Staff Software Engineer, Market Data

About Clear Street:

Clear Street is modernizing the brokerage ecosystem. Founded in 2018, Clear Street is a diversified financial services firm replacing the legacy infrastructure used across capital markets. 

We started from scratch by building a completely cloud-native clearing and custody system designed for today’s complex, global market. Our platform is fully integrated with central clearing houses and exchanges to support billions in trading volume per day. We’ve agonized about our data model abstractions, created horizontal scalability, and crafted thoughtful APIs. All so we can provide a best-in-class experience for our clients. 

By combining highly-skilled product and engineering talent with seasoned finance professionals, we’re building the essentials to compete in today’s fast-paced markets.

The Team: 

The FACT team is responsible for several key data products which enable Clear Street’s systems and personnel to operate with confidence and speed. These products include security and pricing master, corporate actions, and streaming market data as well as a number of other key reference datasets. The FACT team takes on the task of collecting inputs from various sources including vendors, public sources, and internal teams and organizing them into cohesive data products which serve as the authoritative source of reference data within the firm.

The Role: 

We are looking for a skilled and experienced Software Engineer to join our team, building high-performance real-time data pipelines to process financial market data, including security prices for various asset classes such as equities, options, futures, and more. You will play a key role in designing, developing, and optimizing data pipelines that handle large volumes of data with low latency and high throughput, ensuring that our systems can process and deliver market data in real time.

As a Software Engineer in the FACT team, you will work closely with high-impact teams to design and implement cutting-edge solutions that support our trading, analytics, and financial data products. You will play a key role in the design and implementation of key components that support Clear Street’s continued expansion into global markets. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in building low-latency, high-throughput systems, as well as a deep understanding of financial market data structures and processes. Knowledge or direct experience working with market data feed handlers from exchanges is a significant advantage.

• Design, develop, and maintain real-time data pipelines to handle financial market data with low latency and high throughput in a resilient manner.
• Work with various asset classes such as equities, options, futures, and other financial instruments to ensure timely and accurate data processing.
• Collaborate with product, trading, and risk teams to understand requirements and deliver high-quality solutions that meet business needs.
• Develop efficient mechanisms for integrating market data feeds from exchanges and other sources into our systems.
• Troubleshoot and resolve performance issues, data discrepancies, and ensure data integrity across the pipeline.
• Continuously monitor the performance and health of data pipelines, identifying and mitigating potential issues before they impact system performance.

Requirements:

• You have 5+ years of professional experience implementing low-latency, high-throughput data pipelines
• Solid understanding of distributed systems and the challenges involved in real-time data pipelines (e.g., data consistency, fault tolerance, scalability).
• Familiarity with financial market data, including security prices, and asset classes like equities, options, futures, etc.
• Strong familiarity with Linux/BSD
• Familiarity with TCP/IP and UDP (Unicast/Multicast) networking
• You communicate technical ideas with ease and always look to collaborate to deliver high quality products.
• You are a team player, with experience working effectively with other engineers toward common goals

Nice To Haves:

• Experience with system profiling with eBPF
• Experience with columnar storage and database systems 
• Kernel bypass networking (DPDK or XDP)
• Provisioning and configuration of routing in the cloud or on-premise, including BGP, VPCs, network peering
• Experience with Aeron
   

FACT Team Stack: C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Kafka, Kubernetes

We offer:

• The opportunity to join a small and growing team of good people, where you can make a difference.
• A new, high-quality code base with little technical debt and room to build new services and features.
• An environment that embraces the utility of a DevOps oriented culture and combines it with a focus on CI/CD methodology.
• A meritocratic philosophy that champions collaboration.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and perks.

We are considering Senior or Staff-level candidates for this role. The Mid Level Base Salary Range is $140,000 - $190,000. The Senior Level Base Salary Range is $170,000 - $240,000. These ranges are representative of the starting base salaries for this role at Clear Street. Which range a candidate fits into and where a candidate falls in the range will be based on job related factors such as relevant experience, skills, and location. These ranges represent Base Salary only, which is just one element of Clear Street's total compensation. The ranges stated do not include other factors of total compensation such as bonuses or equity.

At Clear Street, we offer competitive compensation packages, company equity, 401k matching, gender neutral parental leave, and full medical, dental and vision insurance. Our belief has always been that we are better as a business when we are all together in person. As such, beginning on January 2, 2023, we are requiring employees to be in the office 4 days per week. In-office benefits include lunch stipends, fully stocked kitchens, happy hours, a great location, and amazing views.

Our top priority is our people. We’re continuously investing in a culture that promotes collaboration. We help each other through challenges and celebrate each other's successes. We believe that modern workplaces succeed by virtue of having high-performance workforces that are diverse — in ideas, in cultures, and in experiences. We put in the effort to make such a workplace a daily reality and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.