Staff Software Engineer (Android)

Company Name: tastytrade  
Role: Staff Software Engineer (Android)
Location: Chicago, IL – Hybrid (3 days/week in office) 
 
As a Staff Engineer on our Mobile Team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the long-term technical direction of our iOS and Android retail trading platforms. You’ll act as both an architect and strategist—defining patterns, guiding cross-team initiatives, and ensuring our mobile applications remain scalable, reliable, and forward-looking. At the same time, you’ll stay close to the code, contributing directly to the most critical and high-impact areas where your expertise will set the standard for technical excellence.  

As a technical leader, you will influence not just what we build, but how we build it: aligning mobile priorities with business goals, driving architectural decisions, and helping engineers across levels deliver their best work. You’ll balance short-term product delivery with long-term platform health, ensuring our mobile experiences are world-class today and sustainable tomorrow.  

We have a native Android app for the phone form factor, and native iOS applications for both iPhone and iPad. Our codebase includes a transpiled Java library which handles interactions with the tastytrade API and provides common functionality across our customer-facing trading platforms.  

What You’ll Do 

• Hands-On Contribution: Remain an active developer and problem-solver, especially in critical or high-risk areas for both iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin, Java). 
• Cross-Functional Influence: Align mobile initiatives with backend, infrastructure, and platform teams to ensure cohesive technical strategies. 
• Architect & Design: Drive the technical design and architecture for large, cross-cutting features across iOS and Android, from business needs to delivery. Provide clear implementation plans that balance scalability, performance, and maintainability. 
• Design Native Replacements: Define and guide the implementation of new native modules that replace shared library functionality, ensuring performance, maintainability, and aligning them with platform best practices. 
• Scope & Estimate: Lead technical discovery and provide reliable effort estimates for large-scale features or initiatives, communicating trade-offs and risks effectively. 
• Raise the Bar: Ideate and recommend new paradigms, tools, or frameworks to improve developer experience, system performance, or process efficiency across mobile teams. 
• Influence Architecture: Drive consistency and shared patterns across platforms while respecting platform-specific paradigms. 
• Knowledge Sharing: Document and evangelize best practices learned through the migration to help future cross-platform initiatives. 
• Mentor & Coach: Provide technical guidance and career support to engineers at all levels, helping seniors sharpen their expertise and mid-levels grow into senior roles. 
• Partner with Stakeholders: Collaborate with product managers, designers, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions with well-defined acceptance criteria. 

Who You Are: 

• Deep expertise in either iOS (Swift) or Android (Kotlin, Java) ecosystems, with a strong understanding of the other. This includes platform constraints and app architecture patterns. 
• A track record of designing and delivering complex, high-impact mobile features at scale. 
• Strong experience leading technical discovery, architectural decision-making, and roadmap planning. 
• A deep understanding of legacy system sunsetting and how to balance business delivery with long-term technical health. 
• Strong ability to create alignment across multiple platforms and teams, driving consensus on architectural decisions. 
• Comfort navigating and refactoring complex, business-critical code with a focus on safety, testing, and rollout strategies. 
• Communication skills, with the ability to explain technical trade-offs to both engineers and business stakeholders. 
• Experience mentoring engineers and uplifting the overall technical quality of a team. 
• The ability to learn quickly in areas in which you don't already have deep expertise. 
• A willingness to learn new languages, frameworks, or technologies beyond your current expertise. 
• A bias toward action: you can move fluidly between strategy and execution, ensuring high-quality results. 

Bonus 

• Experience building highly regulated or secure applications (e.g. fintech, healthcare). 
• Experience with trading, ideally derivatives. 
• Java knowledge 
• Deep expertise in both iOS (Swift) or Android (Kotlin, Java) ecosystems 

Team Perks:     

• Performance Bonuses     
• Stock Purchase Options     
• 401k Plan     
• Medical/Dental/Vision Benefits 
• Annual educational / conference stipend  
• Sustainable workday with minimal on-call responsibilities  
• 20 Paid Vacation Days (plus an additional paid vacation day the month of your birthday!)     
• 10 Paid Sick Days     
• Gym Membership Reimbursement     
• Commuter Benefits     
• Pet Insurance     
• Wellness & Mental Health Programs     
• Charitable Donation Matching     
• Two Paid Volunteer Days Off     
• Daily catered lunch when in the office     
• Full kitchen with snacks and beverages     
• In-building gym     
• Shuttle to/from Metra     
• Office located in the West Loop - Chicago's growing center of tech, great cuisine, and high-end bars   

Salary Range: Level – I $225,000 
The actual salary offered will be based on the candidate's level of experience and qualifications  

About Us:    

The tasty house of brands empowers individual traders differently. tastylive, founded in 2011, is an online financial media network, tastytrade (previously known as tastyworks) is a self-directed retail brokerage firm that launched in 2017, tasty Software Solutions and tastyfx, is a registered Forex broker-dealer. In 2021, London-based IG Group acquired tastylive, Inc. (previously known as tastytrade) and assigned it to lead business in North America. tastyfx is the fastest-growing forex broker in the US over the past few years. Changing the IG US name to tastyfx marks the next chapter, in aligning with the tasty brand family and offering a more forex-focused experience. This combined team has years of experience like institutional brokers, but also a passion for disrupting the entire trading industry.        

Our dream is simple: we want more people to find more success with a better trading experience. That’s why we’re investing heavily in the right people, technology, and media to make that happen in the US and across the globe.      

Location: Our office is in the West Loop - Chicago's growing center of tech, great cuisine, and high-end bars.    

tastytrade | tastylive  | tastyfx | tastycrypto 
1330 W Fulton Market, Chicago, IL 60607     

*Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they have every single qualification. Our team is dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles!