Lead Latency Engineer (Trading Infrastructure)

Location: Austin, TX, US; hybrid with 3+ days at the office. Working hours: 7:30 AM to 3:30 PM US time. Approximately two trips per year to other company offices.

Salary: Up to $190,000 base plus a bonus component.

Company

Proprietary market maker building out an Austin office and developing a US latency capability for trading infrastructure.

What you will do

• Build tick-to-trade monitoring from scratch and establish latency baselines, data points, and measurement tooling.
• Define the latency vision and prioritized, data-driven improvement roadmap.
• Drive latency improvements across C++ hot paths, networking, hardware, kernel bypass, NIC tuning, colocation, time synchronization, and performance measurement.
• Specify latency requirements and validate real-world impact through independent measurements.
• Lead latency design reviews and improve cross-functional understanding of latency data across development, infrastructure, data, and performance teams.
• Scope FPGA and SmartNIC offload for the hottest trading paths and work across third-party software, specialized hardware, and custom components.

Requirements

• 5+ years in performance-critical systems, ideally with deep latency ownership; HPC or comparable high-performance production experience is acceptable.
• Hands-on experience with American exchange connectivity, specifically equities and futures, for latency monitoring and optimization. Energy markets experience is not relevant.
• Strong Linux performance tuning and low-latency networking experience, including the ability to specify and validate kernel-bypass and NIC work.
• Solid C++ skills and hardware-aware understanding of cache hierarchy, false sharing, branch prediction, and memory ordering.
• Ability to build components when needed without owning every line of production code.
• Judgment to analyze latency profiles, identify bottlenecks, and decide between tuning, redesign, and hardware investment.
• Comfort working in a matrix with a small management component focused mainly on guiding others rather than owning headcount.

Nice to have

• Experience building latency monitoring from zero.
• Exposure to FPGA-based acceleration.
• Familiarity with European exchange connectivity.
• Open-source or published work on low-latency systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work with 3+ office days; onsite work is optional but encouraged during the first few months.
• Matrix collaboration across development, infrastructure, data, performance, and hardware specialists.
• Approximately two annual trips to the firm’s other offices.
• No visa sponsorship.
• Reports to the current IT lead until a future Head of IT Operations is hired.
• Up to $190,000 base salary plus a large bonus component; other benefits are still being defined.