Lead Software Developer – Options Market Making

Squarepoint Capital · New York City

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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

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