Staff Software Engineer, Trading Platform - Charts

Topstep is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help build a custom charting engine for the TopstepX trading platform. This role involves designing and building core systems of the charting engine, ensuring performance standards, and mentoring other engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build core systems of the charting engine — rendering primitives (layer system, hit testing, dirty-region rendering, text measurement) and domain features (drawing tools, indicator math)
• Own the framework-agnostic core library architecture, including the public API that React, React Native, and direct consumers integrate against
• Build and maintain the React binding — the thin wrapper layer that adapts the core's public API into framework-native components, hooks, and lifecycle integration. The React Native binding follows as the mobile app matures
• Drive architectural decisions on canvas compositing, layer strategy, and main-thread vs. worker-thread boundaries
• Define and uphold rendering performance standards across the engine — 60fps frame-budget discipline and pointer-interaction responsiveness under continuous data flow
• Build the data integration layer that bridges the existing real-time data pipeline into the charting engine
• Ensure charting engine is consistent and performant across a wide range of devices, from desktop to tablets to mobile
• Establish visual testing standards including pixel diffing, deterministic replay-based tests, and golden-image regression discipline
• Lead architectural reviews and RFCs for the charting library, driving consensus on library architecture across the trading platform without direct authority
• Mentor engineers on the charting team through code reviews, design reviews, pairing, and technical coaching
• Balance technical debt with feature delivery based on long-term library health and consumer needs
• Communicate technical direction, trade-offs, and risk clearly to engineering peers and platform leadership

Requirements:

• 8 + years of frontend engineering experience building and shipping production systems
• Prior experience building or contributing to a production charting library, data visualization framework, or comparable interactive rendering system
• Working knowledge of financial markets — OHLCV, tick data, and futures conventions — sufficient to make informed product and architectural trade-offs
• Deep proficiency in TypeScript including strict mode, advanced generics, and designing public APIs that other engineers consume
• Deep proficiency in React, including production experience designing component libraries, hooks APIs, or framework binding layers
• Production experience with frontend graphics rendering, particularly Canvas 2D — multi-layer compositing, dirty-region rendering, and text metrics
• Demonstrated performance discipline for 60fps real-time rendering — Chrome profiler fluency, frame-budget analysis, and the ability to keep pointer-driven interactions smooth while data flows continuously in the background
• Production experience with Web Workers and SharedArrayBuffer — zero-copy data pipelines, typed-array views over shared memory, Atomics for generation counters, and off-main-thread compute architecture
• 2D math fluency — coordinate transforms, viewport projection, and hit testing
• Track record of architecting libraries with public APIs that consumers integrate against without leaking implementation details
• Discipline around visual testing — pixel diffing, deterministic replay-based tests, and willingness to write and maintain them
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority
• Production experience with real-time streaming systems — WebSocket lifecycle, backpressure, reconnection, and replay
• React Native, react-native-skia, expo-gl, or JSI experience
• Order flow and market microstructure knowledge — footprint charts, volume profile, DOM, cumulative delta
• MessagePack or protobuf experience for binary serialization on the data pipeline
• WebGL2 experience — for a possible future high-density rendering layer
• WebGPU / WGSL experience (long-term migration target)
• Rust + WASM experience (the indicator compute layer is the most likely candidate for a Rust rewrite)
• PineScript or other charting DSL familiarity (for transpiler/runtime work in a later phase)
• Open source contributions to graphics, charting, or financial libraries