tastyworks

tastyworks

Chicago, IL

Senior Software Engineer

The tastytrade family of companies (tastytrade, tastyworks, dough, quiet foundation, and The Small Exchange) empowers individual investors by providing educational media, intuitive and powerful trading software, high-speed order execution, innovative derivatives products, and portfolio guidance. The diversity of our offerings and the technology which powers them provides our engineers with exposure to a broad set of tools and the opportunity to dig deep into specific problems. We are an ideal environment for those who are self-motivated, engineering-focused, pragmatic, and who truly enjoy creating and operating large, highly-available, and performant systems. Our team is lean at roughly 30 members and we follow a management philosophy which values the autonomy of our engineers.

At tastyworks you’ll be part of a team of engineers that builds out the technology that powers our retail brokerage business and supports our other business initiatives. We care about the speed and stability of our back-end systems as much as we care about the customer-facing applications we build. Our architecture is consistently evolving as our business grows and we face different technical challenges, but always with a focus on practicality and performance. You’ll help by modifying existing systems, taking on ownership of current systems as well as green field projects, and troubleshooting issues as they arise. Our engineers work with a plethora of tools including C++, Java, Javascript, and Ruby. You’ll work on front-end and back-end systems in an effort to expand and improve our product suite.

Prerequisites

  • The ability to learn quickly in areas in which you don’t already have deep expertise
  • A mastery of one language and framework, and the ability / willingness to deploy and manage production systems built using these in a production context
  • The ability to jump into a brand new framework or language and quickly become productive in it
  • 5+ years of professional experience working as a software engineer on a team, preferably with some experience as a technical lead or mentor

Specific Responsibilities

  • Work in multiple languages across different parts of the tastyworks stack and / or front-end trading client applications
  • Provide technical leadership for more junior members of the team, by both managing small project teams and providing general technical mentorship
  • Provide concise, constructive, and thoughtful peer reviews for both more junior engineers as well as for other senior engineers. Your peer reviews will cover general codecraft, quality of implementation, and overall business domain correctness.
  • Translate requirements and technical direction into production-quality code
  • Evaluate and build proof of concept implementations leveraging new technology or novel architecture in order to spike a path for new projects
  • Contribute to scaling existing technology by profiling current architecture and refactoring existing code and / or leveraging new technology within existing systems
  • Write comprehensive tests for your code
  • Perform infrastructure work as necessary with support from the infrastructure team to support application development projects
  • Take ownership over several of tastyworks’ systems

*tastyworks is part of a broader family of companies that work to serve all of the needs of the retail trader. We aim to fill the financial vertical with: tastytrade, educational content; tastyworks, a platform and tools for trading derivatives; The Small Exchange, retail-accessible futures products; quiet foundation, a free investment advisory service; dough, a content-filled, easy-to-use stock-trading app; and luckbox, a monthly print and digital financial magazine.


About tastyworks

The tastyworks engineering team is made up of roughly 30 developers, devops engineers, and embedded QA / project management staff. From our trading client applications (a JavaScript web application, a rich desktop application, and two mobile apps), to the highly performant brokerage back-end that powers them all, to the multiple auxiliary services that augment our trading platform, members of the dev team bounce around from project to project as needed. Engineers tend to work in the languages and frameworks they're the strongest in, but we actively encourage members of our team to branch out into new technology that they're interested in. We encourage all members of our team not only to enrich their technical skill set during their tenure at tastyworks but to also gain a deeper understanding of the financial and trading concepts that are core to our business.