Staff Software Engineer, Order Handling and Ledger Team

Company Name: tastytrade  Role: Staff Software Engineer, Order Handling and Ledger Team  Location: Chicago, IL - Hybrid (3 days/week in office)  About the Role:  The tasty family of companies empowers individual investors and traders by providing educational media, intuitive and powerful trading software, high-speed order execution, competitive pricing, and innovative financial products. The diversity of our offerings and the technology that powers them give our engineers exposure to a broad set of tools and the opportunity to dig deep into specific problems. We are an ideal environment for engineers who are self-motivated, pragmatic, and genuinely enjoy creating and operating large, highly available, performant systems. Our team is lean, and our management philosophy values the autonomy of our people.  At tastytrade, you ll be part of the team that builds our retail brokerage business. We care about the speed and stability of our backend systems. Our architecture evolves continually as the business grows and new technical challenges emerge, always with a focus on practicality and performance.    What You ll Do:  Design, build, and own the backend systems behind our order handling, ledger, and settlement flows  Partner with product to scope features, build implementation plans, and oversee execution in collaboration with cross-functional teams  Provide technical leadership across the team, both by leading project teams and by mentoring more junior engineers  Deliver concise, constructive, and thoughtful code reviews covering design and quality, business-domain correctness, stability, and performance   Monitor the external technology landscape and experiment with new tools to solve hard problems or improve the quality of existing solutions  Define engineering-wide standards and guidance, and be the person colleagues across the organization seek out for critical work and decisions  Lead troubleshooting and resolution of complex production issues, collaborating with team members and stakeholders  Share ownership of production by participating in on-call and treating operability as a design requirement    Who You are:  10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time as a technical lead and mentor  Deep expertise in building backend systems, with a strong grasp of concepts such as idempotency, transactions, concurrency control, and reliable communication between services  Mastery of at least one language and framework, and the ability to jump into a brand-new one and quickly become productive following its best practices  Quick to absorb new information and become conversant in unfamiliar concepts and technology, with the humility to acknowledge honestly when you re out of your depth  Pragmatic in your use of AI for research, planning, coding, and code review  Comfortable with ambiguity and able to work from loose concepts  A structured thinker who sees the big picture and balances short-term needs with long-term goals  Self-motivated and biased toward action, with the ability to set priorities and execute in a fast-paced environment  Precise in your attention to detail, with high-quality standards  An exceptional written and verbal communicator, skilled at distilling complex material into straightforward language that everyone in our business can understand  A track record of building and managing relationships with technical teams, stakeholders, and external partners  Preferred Requirements:  Professional experience with Ruby, or with other parts of our stack, such as PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ  Experience with ledgers, settlement, payments, banking, or another domain where money moves and must balance     Base Salary Range: $180,000-$230,000 The actual salary offered will be based on the candidate s level of experience and qualifications.  Discretionary Performance Bonus: 15-20% of base salary based on individual and company performance.   About IGNA + tasty  IG North America is home to tastytr