The Role
Design, build, and optimize high-performance C++ systems for real-time U.S. equity options quote management. Responsibilities include quote lifecycle management, throttling, prioritization, exchange connectivity, recovery, and latency optimization. The role requires expertise in options market microstructure, low-latency multithreaded systems, lock-free data structures, CPU and memory architecture, Linux performance, networking, and end-to-end quote-to-exchange tuning.
Summary Generated by Built In
Position Overview:
We are seeking a highly experienced Lead Software Developer to design, build, and optimize the core technology behind real-time option quote management across U.S. equity options markets.
The candidate must have a proven track record and hands-on experience in the following areas:
- Design and develop a high-performance, event-driven options quoting engine capable of maintaining large numbers of simultaneous two-sided quotes across symbols, strikes, expirations, and exchanges.
- Build efficient quote lifecycle management, including new quote creation, quote replacement, quote and mass quote cancellation, quote refresh, and quote re-entry.
- Implement intelligent quote prioritization, throttling, and backpressure handling when exchange or internal message-rate limits are reached, including per-venue rate budgets, burst controls, quote aging policies, cancel/replace prioritization, and graceful degradation under peak market-data or volatility events.
- Apply strong knowledge of U.S. options market microstructure and exchange matching engine, gateway behavior, including quote-entry protocols, session management, acknowledgments, rejects, recovery, and venue-specific latency, throughput, and throttling constraints.
- Develop high-performance C++ components using lock-free and low-contention data structures, cache-aware data layouts, efficient CPU/core utilization, NUMA awareness, kernel and network-stack optimizations, and high-performance IPC.
- Profile and tune the full quote-to-exchange path to reduce gateway latency and maximize sustained throughput, including exchange session connectivity, serialization/deserialization overhead, batching trade-offs, TCP/UDP/network-stack behavior, pacing logic, queue depth monitoring, latency distribution analysis, and elimination of latency spikes, synchronization bottlenecks, and throughput constraints.
Must haves
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in options electronic market making, with a strong focus on end-to-end quote lifecycle management.
- Strong understanding of CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, caching, concurrency, networking, and Linux performance.
- Demonstrated experience building low-latency, high-throughput, multithreaded systems.
- (Highly preferred) Knowledge of the inner workings of one or multiple US equity option exchanges
Skills Required
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in options electronic market making
- Strong experience with end-to-end quote lifecycle management
- Strong understanding of CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, caching, concurrency, networking, and Linux performance
- Demonstrated experience building low-latency, high-throughput, multithreaded systems
- Knowledge of one or multiple U.S. equity options exchanges
Squarepoint Capital Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Squarepoint Capital and has not been reviewed or approved by Squarepoint Capital.
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Healthcare Strength — Health, dental, and vision insurance are provided alongside FSA options, indicating a broad healthcare offering. Disability, life, and AD&D coverage are also cited as part of the package.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) program is offered, with multiple mentions of a company match. Long‑term financial protections such as life and disability insurance complement the retirement plan.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Generous PTO, paid sick days, and paid volunteer time are included. Parental leave is described as generous.
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The Company
What We Do
Squarepoint Capital is a leading global investment management firm that develops quantitative investment strategies to achieve high quality returns for our clients. We are a data and technology driven firm who specialize in developing automated trading systems that execute across global financial markets.
