Position: Senior Backend Java Engineer

Employment: Full-time, permanent

Location: Chicago Loop – Hybrid, Mondays and Wednesdays onsite

Base Salary: $150,000–$190,000

Additional Compensation: 15% annual bonus, equity package and benefits

Client: A growing institutional digital asset exchange focused on developing next-generation trading technology for institutional market participants.

The company recently raised $76 million in funding and is continuing to invest in its technology organization.

This opportunity is part of a team developing highly scalable, performance-sensitive financial systems, with the ability to contribute to the architecture, functionality and continued growth of the trading platform.

About the Role

Hands-on Senior Backend Java Engineer with deep expertise in core Java development and experience building high-throughput, low-latency production systems.

The team's two biggest priorities are exceptional Java programming ability and meaningful hands-on low-latency engineering experience.

While experience with trading firms, financial exchanges and electronic trading systems is highly valued, the team is also open to engineers from other industries who have worked on similarly demanding, performance-sensitive systems.

This is primarily a backend engineering role, rather than a full-stack or frontend-focused position.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain high-performance backend applications using Java.
• Build and optimize production systems capable of processing large volumes of transactions and messages with minimal latency.
• Develop efficient, reliable messaging and communication components for performance-sensitive environments.
• Identify and resolve application bottlenecks through debugging, profiling and code-level optimization.
• Apply Java concurrency, multithreading and memory management principles to improve system performance and reliability.
• Analyze JVM behavior, garbage collection and memory allocation to identify opportunities for optimization.
• Develop and maintain scalable backend services and APIs.
• Write clean, maintainable, thoroughly tested Java code.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues and contribute to technical design decisions.
• Collaborate with engineers and business stakeholders on architecture, requirements and system improvements.

Core Technical Requirements

Java Development

• 4+ years of professional backend Java development experience.
• Expert-level proficiency in core Java, including object-oriented programming, data structures and algorithms.
• Strong understanding of Java concurrency, multithreading, thread safety and synchronization.
• Knowledge of JVM internals, garbage collection, memory management and performance tuning.
• Experience with Java debugging, profiling and performance optimization.
• Strong unit testing experience, particularly with JUnit.

High-Performance Systems

• Hands-on experience developing high-throughput, low-latency production applications.
• Experience with systems processing approximately 10,000+ messages per second or comparable transaction volumes.
• Understanding of low-millisecond latency requirements, with microsecond-level processing experience especially valuable.
• Ability to explain the throughput, latency characteristics and performance considerations of systems you've personally developed.
• Experience identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in production environments.

other requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a closely related technical discipline.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Strong debugging, problem-solving and communication skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced engineering environment.

Preferred Experience

• Electronic trading systems, financial exchanges, market data infrastructure or other latency-critical systems.
• Messaging infrastructure involved directly in real-time trading workflows.
• High-performance messaging protocols and binary serialization, including SBE.
• FIX protocol or other financial messaging technologies.
• Spring Boot and Spring Framework.
• REST APIs and WebSockets.
• PostgreSQL or other relational databases, including hands-on SQL development.
• Kafka, RabbitMQ or comparable messaging platforms.
• Docker, Kubernetes, microservices and containerized applications.
• Futures, options, derivatives or other financial market products.
• Experience working within smaller engineering teams or rapidly growing technology organizations.