Senior Software Engineer (Events)

Topstep is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join their Events team, focusing on building distributed systems that enhance the trader experience. The role involves defining event-driven architecture and developing cloud-native microservices while ensuring scalability and reliability as the platform grows.

Responsibilities:

• Partner with the technical lead and architect to evolve and strengthen our NATS-based event platform as it scales
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to champion event-driven best practices and deliver scalable, resilient solutions
• Design, build, and operate cloud-native services with an emphasis on reliability, safe deployments, and operational simplicity
• Contribute to backend architecture and help establish patterns that improve consistency and long-term maintainability across teams
• Embed automated testing, observability, and operational ownership into every stage of feature delivery
• Proactively identify and resolve issues, helping ensure our platform remains stable, performant, and ready to grow

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production-grade backend systems with user-facing APIs, with demonstrated impact on scalability and reliability
• Deep expertise in designing and operating scalable, distributed systems, including event-driven architectures, message queues, eventual consistency, and race condition handling, with a strong focus on performance, security, and maintainability
• Strong database fundamentals, including experience with PostgreSQL or SQL Server—schema design, migrations, indexing, and query optimization
• A solid full-stack foundation, with strength in backend API design (TypeScript, GraphQL, REST) and modern frontend development (React, Next.js, TypeScript)
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to distill complex technical concepts for a range of audiences
• A production mindset and bias toward action—embracing metrics, logging, tracing, on-call participation, and end-to-end ownership of delivery
• Experience working with event-driven architectures using systems such as NATS, Kafka, or similar message brokers
• Experience defining clear service boundaries, API versioning strategies, and event-driven patterns within microservices or modular architectures
• Comfort with modern DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code
• Experience building financial, trading, or fintech platforms where data consistency, performance, and reliability are mission-critical
• A track record of positively influencing engineering culture through mentorship, strong documentation, and technical leadership