Staff Software Engineer
Topstep
$200,000–$250,000from the description
Jul 27, 2026
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Jul 28, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Staff Software Engineer role at a proprietary trading firm, focused on designing and building the core real-time trading platform — including market data delivery, brokerage integrations, and high-throughput cloud-native services. The role carries cross-team technical leadership responsibilities: setting architectural patterns, mentoring engineers, and owning systems end-to-end from design through production operations. Work is primarily in .NET/C# with occasional contributions to a React/TypeScript frontend.
Staff level · 8+ years · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 5,200 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 2,750–8,100
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
PostgreSQL and SQL Server are listed as alternatives in the requirements ('PostgreSQL or SQL Server') — PostgreSQL is used as the primary name with SQL Server in alternatives.
The message-queue/async-communication requirement names no specific product (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS); 'message queues' is used as the skill name with common substitutes in alternatives.
Observability/distributed tracing is required but no specific tooling product (e.g. Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger) is named.
The role is described as fully remote to hybrid; remote is set to true as the posting explicitly states fully remote is an option.
The company is headquartered in Chicago, IL (Topstep LLC, Illinois-registered entity); CBSA reflects that location, though the role may be worked remotely from elsewhere in the US.
Kubernetes is listed under Preferred with the qualifier 'EKS or equivalent', along with Helm and ArgoCD (GitOps).
SignalR/WebSockets is listed under Preferred as real-time client communications experience.
Read the full posting
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