Staff Software Engineer (Events)

Topstep is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Events team, playing a critical role in shaping the distributed systems that enhance the trader experience. The individual will lead complex initiatives, mentor engineers, and drive engineering excellence across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and evolution of complex systems with a long-term, platform-wide perspective
• Drive high-impact engineering initiatives across teams, aligning architecture with business and product strategy
• Partner with stakeholders to identify technical opportunities, surface trade-offs, and make clear, strategic decisions
• Guide cross-functional delivery efforts—setting direction, unblocking teams, and ensuring consistency and quality at scale
• Invest in reliability, observability, and scalability across systems to enable faster iteration and resilient experiences
• Mentor engineers at all levels and help grow the technical leadership bench within the team
• Champion clarity in communication, technical writing, and cross-team collaboration
• Contribute to the culture of engineering at Topstep through thought leadership, shared practices, and community involvement

Requirements:

• 8+ years of professional experience in software engineering, with demonstrated impact at a Staff or equivalent level
• Proven success leading architecture and delivery across multiple teams or systems
• Deep expertise in building scalable, distributed systems including event-driven architectures, message queues, eventual consistency, and handling race conditions. With a focus on performance, security, and maintainability
• Track record of influencing engineering culture through mentorship, documentation, and technical leadership
• Strong communication skills with the ability to distill complex technical ideas for a variety of audiences
• A growth mindset and a bias toward action—balancing technical vision with pragmatic 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
• Strong full-stack foundation with expertise in both backend API design (GraphQL, REST) and modern frontend development (React, Next.js, TypeScript)
• Comfort with modern DevOps practices, CI/CD tooling, and infrastructure as code
• Background contributing to design systems or component libraries used across multiple teams