Principal Software Engineer

Join Cboe's Data Vantage division as a Principal Software Engineer. In this hands-on role, you will lead the design and implementation of back-end services and API infrastructure for the Silexx order and execution management platform. You will work with AI coding assistants, define REST and gRPC contracts, build real-time data distribution, and establish back-end engineering standards.

The ideal candidate has 10+ years of experience in back-end and distributed systems development, a deep understanding of RESTful and streaming transport protocols, and experience mentoring engineers. - Lead the design, architecture, and implementation of Silexx’s back-end services in C#/.NET, including 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. - Drive observability, capacity planning, and performance profiling for systems that must remain available through market hours, and maintain a highly available production platform. - 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 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 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