Sr. Manager, Software Engineering - API

TradeStation is an online brokerage firm focused on delivering the ultimate trading experience for active traders and institutions. They are seeking a Sr. Manager, Software Engineering to lead the development of their next-generation API platform, responsible for driving technical strategy and execution to enhance the developer experience and increase platform adoption.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as an inspirational and outcome-driven leader — execution and follow-up is everything
• Own the technical strategy and technical roadmap for TradeStation's API platform, spanning REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and AI-native protocols (MCP), partnering with Product Management on product strategy and prioritization
• Drive API-first design principles across the organization, ensuring consistency, discoverability, and developer ergonomics across all API surfaces
• Foster a developer-experience (DX) mindset: treat external and internal API consumers as customers, obsess over documentation quality, onboarding friction, and time-to-first-call
• Lead the adoption of gRPC as the internal high-performance service protocol, establishing patterns, tooling, and best practices for teams across the organization
• Define and enforce API governance standards including versioning, deprecation policies, rate limiting, authentication/authorization patterns, and SLA management
• Collaborate closely with Product Management, Business, and executive stakeholders to translate business objectives into technical execution plans that drive trade revenue and platform adoption
• Manage cloud-native infrastructure strategy on AWS and Kubernetes, optimizing for reliability, performance, and cost efficiency
• Champion psychological safety within the team environment, modeling it and insisting on it as a core value
• Select, assess, develop, mentor, manage, and retain top technical talent
• Effectively manage people, including planning, assigning, and directing work; evaluating performance, addressing complaints, and resolving problems
• Ensure knowledge sharing among the team to avoid information silos and address key-staff risks
• Continuously refine development processes to improve overall performance and reduce friction to delivery
• Mange and maintain Agile practices and track team performance based on outcomes
• Clear roadblocks for teams to ensure delivery focus
• Participate in business planning and communicate technical knowledge of vision for both current and future API products

Requirements:

• BS in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or equivalent work experience
• 7+ years of relevant team management and leadership experience in high-performance, business-critical environments
• Experience in the brokerage or financial services industry, especially building APIs for trading or market data
• Experience designing and operating developer portals, SDKs, and API documentation platforms
• Knowledge of AI/ML integration patterns for APIs, including function-calling interfaces, streaming responses, and agent-to-API communication (e.g., MCP, tool-use protocols)
• Experience with high-throughput, low-latency API systems serving real-time financial data
• Understanding of regulatory requirements for API access controls, data distribution, and audit logging in financial services
• Track record of growing API adoption and measuring developer experience through metrics (TTFB, error rates, adoption funnels)
• Experience with infrastructure as code and automating deployments in cloud-native environments
• Familiarity with service mesh architectures (Istio, Linkerd) and observability stacks for distributed API systems