{"id":3656944,"url":"https://alion.io/job/rothera-director-staff-engineer-low-latency","title":"Director, Staff Engineer (Low Latency)","company":{"id":4497943,"name":"Rothera","domain":"rothera.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/rothera","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":null},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Chicago, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":175000,"max":200000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":200000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Java","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-03-10T17:30:47Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-08","last_verified_at":"2026-11-11T05:20:32Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":245,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":245},"description":"Bringing the future into focus.\nRothera is building the premier prediction market in partnership with Robinhood and Susquehanna International Group.\nBy empowering traders to take positions on the events that shape our world Rothera’s platform harnesses the scale and power of financial markets to produce timely, unique, and effective information discovery for leaders and decision makers to ask and answer their most important questions. \nRothera operates at the frontier, generating market-driven forecasts that turn intuition into insight.\nAbout the role\nYou will help drive the evolution of our low-latency, high-throughput applications, focusing on exchange and clearing systems. This includes expanding the platform's features, ensuring its scalability, and meticulously maintaining performance.\nThis role is designed for a technical leader who thrives on solving the “hard problems” in financial markets, has deep expertise in low-latency systems, and can help architect financial technology that operates with microsecond precision at scale, while maintaining the highest standards of financial integrity.\nWhat you’ll do\nHelp architect, implement, and maintain Rothera's core exchange and clearing infrastructure, ensuring the system is performant, scalable, and ultra-reliable.\nProvide technical leadership and hands-on contributions to system design patterns, frameworks, protocols, and data architectures, ensuring they meet the requirements for performance, reliability, correctness, and maintainability.\nUtilize Aeron and Hydra frameworks to build ultra-low-latency and high-throughput messaging architectures that power the core of our infrastructure.\nHandle massive data volumes efficiently, designing storage and retrieval patterns for market data, trade history, positions, and audit trails.\nCollaborate with the Product team and other stakeholders to design technical solutions for new, innovative financial products.\nParticipate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents requiring deep technical troubleshooting.\nWhat you’ll bring\nBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline.\n8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time spent building high-performance, low-latency distributed systems.\nExpert-level Java proficiency, including deep understanding of concurrency primitives, memory management, JVM internals, and performance optimization techniques.\nExperience with Hydra, Aeron or other low latency messaging frameworks.\nProven experience building systems at scale that handle high message throughput (100k+ msgs/sec), low latency (sub-millisecond p99), and high availability (99.99%+ uptime).\nExperience with financial markets technology and understanding of order books, matching algorithms, and derivatives products.\nBenefits & Compensation\nThis position has a base salary of $175,000-$200,000 per year. \nRothera is dedicated to advancing the careers and personal wellbeing of our team members. We are continuously exploring ways to support our employees holistically, including a 401(k) plan with employer match, health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and eligible dependents, paid time off, and much more.\nWhy you should join the mission\nIf you want a critical role in a path-breaking company, you belong here. \nRothera values initiative from individuals of all backgrounds. We are proud to be an inclusive workplace and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, age, disability or handicap, sex, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws.\nThis is a full-time, in-person hybrid position with an expectation to be on-site Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. This position is not available for visa sponsorship now or in the future. 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