Staff Full Stack Engineer

Topstep is seeking a Staff Full Stack Engineer to play a foundational role in shaping the trader experience. The role involves designing end-to-end solutions, leading architectural modernization, and mentoring engineers while ensuring system reliability and performance.

Responsibilities:

• Set technical direction for full-stack architecture across the engineering organization, influencing how we design APIs, structure frontends, and ensure system reliability
• Own end-to-end feature development from Postgres schema design through GraphQL APIs to Next.js UI, ensuring seamless integration and optimal performance
• Establish engineering patterns for GraphQL schema design, React component architecture, state management, and API/UI coupling that other teams can adopt
• Partner with product and design to translate trader needs into technical solutions that balance user experience with system constraints
• Drive architectural improvements during our modernization initiative, helping transition from monolithic systems to event-driven microservices while maintaining feature velocity
• Lead technical initiatives that materially improve developer experience, system performance, or code quality across the organization
• Mentor engineers across teams on full-stack best practices, architectural thinking, and production ownership
• Champion quality and reliability by embedding testing, monitoring, and operational thinking into every feature you ship

Requirements:

• 7+ years of professional experience building production web applications, with demonstrated impact establishing patterns and practices that scaled across multiple teams
• Strong full-stack foundation with expertise in both backend API design (GraphQL, REST) and modern frontend development (React, Next.js, TypeScript)
• Deep PostgreSQL knowledge including schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, and understanding of transaction isolation and consistency patterns
• Proven GraphQL expertise designing schemas, implementing resolvers, optimizing queries (N+1 problems, data loader patterns), and building maintainable API layers
• Modern frontend mastery with Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, including Server Components, hydration patterns, and performance optimization
• Production ownership mindset with experience building observable, testable, and maintainable systems including instrumentation, error handling, and debugging distributed issues
• Solid understanding of distributed systems including event-driven architectures, message queues, eventual consistency, and handling race conditions
• Track record of technical leadership through RFCs, architectural documentation, code reviews, and establishing engineering standards
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to varied audiences and build consensus across teams
• Comfortable making pragmatic decisions balancing long-term architectural vision with immediate business needs and feature delivery
• Experience building financial, trading, or fintech platforms where data consistency, performance, and reliability are critical
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures using systems like NATS, Kafka, or similar message brokers
• Experience with AWS infrastructure (RDS, EKS/ECS, CloudWatch, ALB) and understanding of how frontend/backend services deploy and scale
• Background contributing to design systems or component libraries used across multiple teams
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform) and CI/CD practices