Senior Software Engineer (Events)

Summary

As a Senior Software Engineer at Topstep, you’ll join the Events team and play a key role in building the distributed systems that power our trader experience. You’ll help define and evolve the event-driven architecture that serves as the communication backbone across our platforms, ensuring reliability, scalability, and clarity as our ecosystem grows. You’ll work primarily in TypeScript and React, building cloud-native microservices that support high-throughput, low-latency workloads. In addition to shipping features, you’ll influence backend architecture, establish engineering patterns adopted across teams, and help ensure the platform scales safely as usage and complexity increase.

This role is ideal for someone who combines hands-on execution with strategic vision—someone who enjoys working across boundaries, challenging assumptions, and delivering elegant solutions that scale with intention. Join us and help shape what engineering excellence looks like at Topstep.

Key Responsibilities 

• Partner with the technical lead and architect to evolve and strengthen our NATS-based event platform as it scales.
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to champion event-driven best practices and deliver scalable, resilient solutions.
• Design, build, and operate cloud-native services with an emphasis on reliability, safe deployments, and operational simplicity.
• Contribute to backend architecture and help establish patterns that improve consistency and long-term maintainability across teams.
• Embed automated testing, observability, and operational ownership into every stage of feature delivery.
• Proactively identify and resolve issues, helping ensure our platform remains stable, performant, and ready to grow.

Required Qualifications and Key Competencies

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production-grade backend systems with user-facing APIs, with demonstrated impact on scalability and reliability.
• Deep expertise in designing and operating scalable, distributed systems, including event-driven architectures, message queues, eventual consistency, and race condition handling, with a strong focus on performance, security, and maintainability.
• Strong database fundamentals, including experience with PostgreSQL or SQL Server—schema design, migrations, indexing, and query optimization.
• A solid full-stack foundation, with strength in backend API design (TypeScript, GraphQL, REST) and modern frontend development (React, Next.js, TypeScript).
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to distill complex technical concepts for a range of audiences.
• A production mindset and bias toward action—embracing metrics, logging, tracing, on-call participation, and end-to-end ownership of delivery.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with event-driven architectures using systems such as NATS, Kafka, or similar message brokers.
• Experience defining clear service boundaries, API versioning strategies, and event-driven patterns within microservices or modular architectures.
• Comfort with modern DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience building financial, trading, or fintech platforms where data consistency, performance, and reliability are mission-critical.
• A track record of positively influencing engineering culture through mentorship, strong documentation, and technical leadership.

Company Culture & Perks

• Topstep is an engaging working environment which ranges from fully remote to hybrid. We foster a culture of collaboration with cameras on during meetings and a robust Slack environment for communication. 
• Seven Company-paid Holidays and generous Family Leave. Paid time off is front-loaded.
• Competitive 401(k) matching, health, dental, and vision insurance is offered for full time employees.
• Vacations are encouraged with a bonus for taking 5 consecutive days. Employee referrals are bonused. Topstep offers a food and groceries budget and contributes towards health and wellness.

New Hire Base Salary Range

• $157,000-$193,000.
• Bonus: This position is eligible for a performance-based bonus as provided by the plan terms and governing documents.
• The compensation offered will take into account internal compensation structure and may vary depending on the candidate's geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Topstep is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where all employees and applicants are valued. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status, in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.

Interested in the role? Apply today with your resume!