Candidates who are primarily looking for task-based development work may not be the right fit; this role requires technical ownership before, during, and after implementation.
We are seeking a hands-on Lead Backend Engineer / Technical Lead to help design, evolve, and extend the backend and middleware systems that support our trading and market data infrastructure.
This is not a ticket-only development role. We are looking for someone who can take business needs, operational problems, and high-level requirements and turn them into clear technical designs, implementation plans, acceptance criteria, and production-ready code.
You will work on real trading systems involving market data ingestion, exchange connectivity, clearing and regulatory workflows, pre-trade and post-trade processing, and internal services that must be correct, fast, observable, and resilient.
The right person is a strong Java engineer who can also think at the system level: understand tradeoffs, design service boundaries, challenge incomplete requirements, define edge cases, guide other developers, and own technical outcomes from concept through production.
What You’ll Own
- Translate business and operational requirements into technical designs, implementation plans, and acceptance criteria
- Design backend services and middleware components for trading, market data, clearing, regulatory, and post-trade workflows
- Lead technical design discussions and make practical architecture decisions across services, databases, APIs, and integrations
- Write high-quality code for low-latency, high-reliability systems
- Define service contracts, data flows, error handling, observability, retry behavior, and failure modes
- Design and optimize SQL schemas, queries, stored procedures, and data integrity rules
- Integrate with exchanges, clearinghouses, regulatory systems, internal platforms, and third-party services
- Review code and designs from other engineers with a focus on correctness, maintainability, performance, and operational risk
- Identify architectural gaps, technical debt, production risks, and opportunities to simplify or harden the system
- Partner with business stakeholders, product owners, operations, QA, and other developers to clarify requirements before implementation begins
- Support production systems when needed and use incidents as feedback for better architecture and design
- Help establish engineering standards, design patterns, documentation practices, and development best practices
What We’re Looking For
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant backend Java experience
- Strong Java expertise, including concurrency, collections, memory behavior, performance tuning, and production debugging
- Proven experience designing systems, not just implementing assigned tickets
- Experience writing or contributing to technical design documents, architecture proposals, implementation plans, or RFCs
- Ability to define acceptance criteria, edge cases, failure scenarios, and testable technical requirements
- Experience with trading systems, market data platforms, financial infrastructure, or other high-throughput/low-latency systems
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, messaging, service-oriented architecture, APIs, and data consistency
- Strong SQL experience, including schema design, query tuning, indexing, data modeling, and transactional integrity
- Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Strong judgment around when to build, refactor, simplify, harden, or defer
- Comfort working in regulated or compliance-driven environments
Preferred Experience
- Exchange connectivity, FIX protocol, proprietary exchange APIs, or market data feeds
- Clearing, settlement, allocation, give-up, regulatory, or post-trade workflows
- Pre-trade risk, order routing, execution workflows, or brokerage/trading operations
- Linux-based server environments
- Message queues, streaming systems, event-driven architecture, or real-time processing
- Observability tools, logging standards, metrics, alerting, and production diagnostics
- Cloud or hybrid infrastructure experience
- Experience mentoring developers or serving as a technical lead on complex backend systems
What Success Looks Like
Within the first 30 days, you will understand the core architecture, major data flows, production risks, and current development process.
Within 60 days, you will be contributing production code, reviewing designs, improving acceptance criteria, and helping shape implementation plans before development starts.
Within 90 days, you will be leading design for meaningful backend changes, identifying architectural risks, and helping the team move from ticket execution to better technical ownership.
This Role Is a Fit If You
- Ask “what problem are we solving?” before jumping into code
- Can turn ambiguity into a clear technical plan
- Care about correctness, latency, resilience, and maintainability
- Know how to make practical architecture decisions without over-engineering
- Are comfortable challenging unclear requirements respectfully
- Can still write serious production code while operating at a higher design level
- Want ownership of systems, not just a queue of tickets
Skills Required
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Significant backend Java experience
- Strong Java expertise (concurrency, collections, memory behavior, performance tuning, production debugging)
- Proven experience designing systems and producing technical design documents, architecture proposals, or RFCs
- Ability to define acceptance criteria, edge cases, failure scenarios, and testable technical requirements
- Experience with trading systems, market data platforms, financial infrastructure, or other high-throughput/low-latency systems
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, messaging, service-oriented architecture, APIs, and data consistency
- Strong SQL experience including schema design, query tuning, indexing, stored procedures, and transactional integrity
- Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Comfort working in regulated or compliance-driven environments
- Willingness to support production systems and use incidents to improve design and operations
- Experience leading technical design discussions and guiding other developers
- Experience with exchange connectivity, FIX protocol, proprietary exchange APIs, or market data feeds
- Experience with clearing, settlement, allocation, give-up, regulatory, or post-trade workflows
- Experience with pre-trade risk, order routing, execution workflows, or brokerage/trading operations
- Familiarity with Linux-based server environments
- Experience with message queues, streaming systems, or event-driven architectures
- Experience with observability tools, logging, metrics, alerting, and production diagnostics
- Cloud or hybrid infrastructure experience
- Experience mentoring developers or serving as a technical lead on complex backend systems
Ironbeam Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Ironbeam and has not been reviewed or approved by Ironbeam.
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Healthcare Strength — Job postings list medical, dental, and vision coverage as part of the core package. Feedback suggests this reflects a standard employer offering in recent 2024–2025 ads.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid time off is explicitly included in role descriptions. Feedback suggests postings are the clearest current indicator of available leave.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) is consistently mentioned as part of the package. Feedback suggests specifics like employer match and vesting should be requested to assess overall value.
Ironbeam Insights
What We Do
A registered Futures Commission Merchant ("FCM") providing brokerage, clearing, execution and technology services for Exchange Traded Futures and Option Contacts. We have a robust operational and technological infrastructure to leverage for market connectivity and futures trading. We offer multiple trading platforms and products and have exclusive access to the Firetip trading platform.
