Director Staff Engineer - Low Latency

Bringing the future into focus.

Rothera is building the premier prediction market in partnership with Robinhood and Susquehanna International Group.

By empowering traders to take positions on the events that shape our world Rothera’s platform harnesses the scale and power of financial markets to produce timely, unique, and effective information discovery for leaders and decision makers to ask and answer their most important questions. 

Rothera operates at the frontier, generating market-driven forecasts that turn intuition into insight.

About the role

You will help drive the evolution of our low-latency, high-throughput applications, focusing on exchange and clearing systems. This includes expanding the platform's features, ensuring its scalability, and meticulously maintaining performance.

This role is designed for a technical leader who thrives on solving the “hard problems” in financial markets, has deep expertise in low-latency systems, and can help architect financial technology that operates with microsecond precision at scale, while maintaining the highest standards of financial integrity.

What you’ll do

• Help architect, implement, and maintain Rothera's core exchange and clearing infrastructure, ensuring the system is performant, scalable, and ultra-reliable.
• Provide technical leadership and hands-on contributions to system design patterns, frameworks, protocols, and data architectures, ensuring they meet the requirements for performance, reliability, correctness, and maintainability.
• Utilize Aeron and Hydra frameworks to build ultra-low-latency and high-throughput messaging architectures that power the core of our infrastructure.
• Handle massive data volumes efficiently, designing storage and retrieval patterns for market data, trade history, positions, and audit trails.
• Collaborate with the Product team and other stakeholders to design technical solutions for new, innovative financial products.
• Participate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents requiring deep technical troubleshooting.

What you’ll bring

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time spent building high-performance, low-latency distributed systems.
• Expert-level Java proficiency, including deep understanding of concurrency primitives, memory management, JVM internals, and performance optimization techniques.
• Experience with Hydra, Aeron or other low latency messaging frameworks.
• Proven experience building systems at scale that handle high message throughput (100k+ msgs/sec), low latency (sub-millisecond p99), and high availability (99.99%+ uptime).
• Experience with financial markets technology and understanding of order books, matching algorithms, and derivatives products.

Benefits & Compensation

This position has a base salary of $175,000-$200,000 per year. 

Rothera is dedicated to advancing the careers and personal wellbeing of our team members. We are continuously exploring ways to support our employees holistically, including a 401(k) plan with employer match, health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and eligible dependents, paid time off, and much more.

Why you should join the mission

If you want a critical role in a path-breaking company, you belong here. 

Rothera values initiative from individuals of all backgrounds. We are proud to be an inclusive workplace and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, age, disability or handicap, sex, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws.

This is a full-time, in-person hybrid position with an expectation to be on-site Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. This position is not available for visa sponsorship now or in the future. Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. on a permanent, indefinite basis.