Principal Backend Engineer – Brokerage (New York)

About the Role

Lead the design and development of scalable backend systems for a new brokerage product initiative. This role sits within a high-performance engineering team building core infrastructure for trading and investment applications across web and mobile platforms.

You will take ownership of backend architecture, drive technical direction, and work closely with product, frontend, and infrastructure teams to deliver reliable, secure, and high-throughput systems.

What You'll Do

• Design and build scalable backend systems, APIs, and services supporting brokerage and trading applications
• Lead architecture decisions across microservices and event-driven systems
• Ensure systems are secure, resilient, and capable of handling high transaction volumes
• Collaborate with product, frontend, and infrastructure teams to deliver end-to-end features
• Drive engineering best practices across testing, code quality, and deployment
• Contribute to system reliability, performance tuning, and scalability improvements
• Stay current with backend engineering, fintech infrastructure, and emerging technologies
• Leverage modern tooling (including AI-assisted development) to improve engineering efficiency

Essential Requirements

• Retail brokerage or trading systems experience (mandatory)
• Strong backend engineering experience with Node.js and TypeScript (NestJS / Express)
• Proven experience designing microservices and event-driven architectures
• Strong SQL expertise, with exposure to Kafka or similar messaging systems
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP) and Docker + Kubernetes
• Strong understanding of building high-volume, low-latency backend systems
• 10+ years backend engineering experience, including senior/lead or architecture ownership roles

Nice to Have

• Startup or zero-to-one product experience
• Exposure to additional data systems (NoSQL, caching layers, distributed systems patterns)