Staff Software Engineer

Summary 

Are you a full-stack engineer who thrives on designing elegant end-to-end solutions, shipping high-quality features, and raising the technical bar for teams around you? As a Staff Full Stack Engineer at Topstep, you'll play a foundational role in shaping the trader experience—from the database schema to the UI components traders interact with daily. You'll be instrumental in our architectural modernization, establishing patterns that enable teams to move fast with confidence while maintaining the reliability and performance that traders demand.

This role is ideal for someone who brings both deep technical expertise and a product mindset. Someone who's excited to own features end-to-end, establish reusable patterns that scale across teams, and mentor engineers who are building the next generation of our platform. Join us and help define what technical excellence looks like at Topstep.

Key Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for full-stack architecture across the engineering organization, influencing how we design APIs, structure frontends, and ensure system reliability
• Own end-to-end feature development from Postgres schema design through GraphQL APIs to Next.js UI, ensuring seamless integration and optimal performance
• Establish engineering patterns for GraphQL schema design, React component architecture, state management, and API/UI coupling that other teams can adopt
• Partner with product and design to translate trader needs into technical solutions that balance user experience with system constraints
• Drive architectural improvements during our modernization initiative, helping transition from monolithic systems to event-driven microservices while maintaining feature velocity
• Lead technical initiatives that materially improve developer experience, system performance, or code quality across the organization
• Mentor engineers across teams on full-stack best practices, architectural thinking, and production ownership
• Champion quality and reliability by embedding testing, monitoring, and operational thinking into every feature you ship

Required Qualifications and Key Competencies

• 7+ years of professional experience building production web applications, with demonstrated impact establishing patterns and practices that scaled across multiple teams
• Strong full-stack foundation with expertise in both backend API design (GraphQL, REST) and modern frontend development (React, Next.js, TypeScript)
• Deep PostgreSQL knowledge including schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, and understanding of transaction isolation and consistency patterns
• Proven GraphQL expertise designing schemas, implementing resolvers, optimizing queries (N+1 problems, data loader patterns), and building maintainable API layers
• Modern frontend mastery with Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, including Server Components, hydration patterns, and performance optimization
• Production ownership mindset with experience building observable, testable, and maintainable systems including instrumentation, error handling, and debugging distributed issues
• Solid understanding of distributed systems including event-driven architectures, message queues, eventual consistency, and handling race conditions
• Track record of technical leadership through RFCs, architectural documentation, code reviews, and establishing engineering standards
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to varied audiences and build consensus across teams
• Comfortable making pragmatic decisions balancing long-term architectural vision with immediate business needs and feature delivery

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building financial, trading, or fintech platforms where data consistency, performance, and reliability are critical
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures using systems like NATS, Kafka, or similar message brokers
• Experience with AWS infrastructure (RDS, EKS/ECS, CloudWatch, ALB) and understanding of how frontend/backend services deploy and scale
• Background contributing to design systems or component libraries used across multiple teams
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform) and CI/CD practices

New Hire Base Salary Range

• $200,000-$250,000
• Bonus: This position is eligible for a performance-based bonus as provided by the plan terms and governing documents.
• The compensation offered will take into account internal compensation structure and may vary depending on the candidate's geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors.

Company Culture & Perks

• Topstep is an engaging working environment which ranges from fully remote to hybrid. We foster a culture of collaboration with cameras-on during meetings and a robust Slack environment for communication.
• 10 Company-paid Holidays and generous Family Leave. Paid time off is accrued monthly.
• Competitive 401(k) matching, health, dental, and vision insurance is offered for full time employees
• Vacations are encouraged with a bonus for taking 5 consecutive days. Employee referrals are bonused. Topstep offers a food and groceries budget and contributes towards health and wellness.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Topstep is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where all employees and applicants are valued. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status, in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.

Interested in the role? Apply today with your resume and cover letter!

At this time immigration sponsorship is not available for this position (including H-1B, STEM OPT training plans, etc.).