Principal Software Engineer
Posted Updated
- Cboe’s Data Vantage division — the team behind the Silexx order and execution management platform — is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to lead the design and build-out of our back-end services and API infrastructure
- This is a hands-on principal role for a seasoned back-end engineer who is an expert in C#/
- NET and who thinks in terms of contracts, throughput, and reliability
- You will architect and implement the services, APIs, and real-time data pipelines that power Silexx’s trading, analytics, and risk-management workflows, and you will define how our own clients and our customers’ systems integrate with the platform
- You will be comfortable working with AI coding assistants such as Claude across the software development lifecycle to accelerate delivery and raise quality
- Lead the design, architecture, and implementation of Silexx’s back-end services in C#/.NET — spanning order and execution workflows, market data, analytics, and risk
- Own the API platform end to end: define REST, gRPC, and real-time streaming contracts, establish versioning and deprecation policy, and maintain backward compatibility for the internal teams and external clients that depend on them
- Build and scale real-time data distribution — market data fan-out, order and execution event streams, and low-latency messaging — against explicit latency and throughput targets
- Define the service topology: decompose large components into well-bounded microservices, set service boundaries, and establish standards for inter-service communication
- Implement secure server communications and authentication/authorization using RESTful and streaming protocols, OpenID Connect, and OAuth 2.0
- Drive observability, capacity planning, and performance profiling for systems that must remain available through market hours, and maintain a highly available production platform
- Partner with the front-end, WPF desktop (Silexx OEMS), and client-integration teams so that the APIs you design are practical for the clients that consume them; support customers through integration, requirements analysis, and troubleshooting
- Establish back-end engineering standards — automated unit, integration, and contract testing, CI/CD release gates, code review, and API documentation
- Provide architectural direction for continued growth into new asset classes, products, regions, and models; distill complex requirements into manageable features and tasks
- Mentor engineers across teams, help managers onboard and train new associates, and act as a key participant in the interview and assessment process
- Diagnose and resolve complex production problems spanning the service, data, and network layers
- The ideal candidate has spent years building low-latency, high-volume distributed systems, has a deep understanding of RESTful, gRPC, and streaming transport protocols, and treats API design, versioning, and backward compatibility as first-class engineering concerns
- 10+ years of hands-on experience in professional back-end and distributed systems development
- A track record of building low-latency, high-volume, highly available distributed systems
- Experience dealing with customers through support and requirements analysis
- Experience mentoring engineers and providing technical leadership across teams
- Demonstrated ownership of a platform-level or externally consumed API — design, versioning, documentation, and support of the consumers on it
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related STEM field
- Expert-level command of C#/.NET and ASP.NET Core for building high-throughput, production-critical services
- Strong OOP skills, experience with design patterns, and a solid grounding in computer science fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and concurrency
- Expertise in throughput optimization techniques, serialization (MessagePack, Protobuf), and compression methods
- Proficiency in building RESTful APIs, gRPC services, WebSockets, and other real-time communication methods
- Strong understanding of data structures and algorithms, profiling, and performance optimization
- Experience with message brokers and streaming platforms such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Redis
- Advanced experience with C#/.NET and ASP.NET Core, including async/await, concurrency and threading models, and memory- and GC-aware performance work
- Microservices architecture, service decomposition, and event-driven design
- Strong SQL skills, sufficient to write and tune complex queries against production workloads
- Testing & Quality:
- Experience embedding automated tests into CI/CD pipelines as release gates
- Contract-first API design using OpenAPI/Swagger and Protobuf IDL, with a deliberate approach to schema evolution and versioning
- Data & Persistence:
- Networking fundamentals — TCP/IP, TLS, HTTP/2, load balancing, and connection management for long-lived streaming sessions
- Proficient in database technologies such as Postgres, SQL Server, and MySQL, and ORM frameworks like Entity Framework
- Security:
- Experience publishing and maintaining developer-facing API documentation and client SDKs
- Load, soak, and latency testing of services at realistic market-hour volumes
- Secure API practices including input validation, secrets management, and least-privilege access
- Command of API gateway concerns: routing, throttling and rate limiting, quotas, idempotency, pagination, and a consistent error model
- Expertise designing and implementing unit, integration, and contract test automation for services and APIs, using xUnit/NUnit and API/contract testing tooling
- API Platform & Integration:
- Expertise in implementing authentication and authorization using OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and related security standards
- Schema design, indexing, query tuning, and zero-downtime migrations across transactional and time-series workloads
- Experience with security code scanning and remediating identified vulnerabilities
- Proficiency using AI coding assistants such as Claude for code generation, test creation, code review, and refactoring
- Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and DevOps practices (CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, etc.)
- Comfortable with Windows and Linux operating systems
- Excellent communication, problem-solving, and leadership skills
- Other Skills:
- Containerization (Docker/Kubernetes) and cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP)
- Experience with financial industry systems, real-time trading, order routing workflows, market data distribution, or equity, option and futures trading platforms
- Familiarity with the FIX protocol and OEMS or venue integrations
- Observability and SRE practice — OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog, and working with SLOs and error budgets
- Familiarity with GraphQL
- Working knowledge of WPF desktop clients sufficient to build APIs against, integrate with, and test them (e.g., the Silexx OEMS)
- Experience with tools such as PowerShell, Git, Jenkins, Jira, Confluence, JetBrains Suite, and Wireshark
Skills
- Agile
- AI
- Analytics
- API
- Api Design
- Api Documentation
- Authentication
- Automation
- AWS
- Azure
- CI/CD
- Cloud
- Confluence
- Containerization
- C#
- Data Pipelines
- Datadog
- Design Patterns
- DevOps
- Distributed Systems
- Docker
- .NET
- Event Driven Architecture
- GCP
- Git
- Grafana
- GraphQL
- gRPC
- Jenkins
- Jira
- Kafka
- Kubernetes
- Linux
- Microservices
- MySQL
- Networking
- OAuth
- Observability
- OOP
- OpenAPI
- OpenID
- OpenTelemetry
- PostgreSQL
- PowerShell
- Prometheus
- Protobuf
- RabbitMQ
- Redis
- REST
- Scrum
- Secrets Management
- SQL
- SQL Server
- Swagger
- TCP/IP
- Test Automation
- Time Series
- TLS
- Websockets
- Wireshark
- Wpf