Head of Technical Operations & Architecture

Head of Technical Operations & Architecture

Location:

Frisco, TX (Hybrid, 3‑4 days On‑Site)

Reports To:

CEO/Founder

Compensation: $110,000 – $125,000 Base Salary + Equity Grant + Benefits

Stack Trading is an early‑stage fintech company building a Direct Market Access (DMA) ecosystem. We are disrupting the high‑volume proprietary trading industry by replacing the current simulation‑only model with a regulatory‑compliant career path for professional traders. We have architected a Decoupled Execution Topology that separates our business logic (Node.js/AWS) from our market risk logic (Execution Cores). With capital secured and the legal structure in place, we are hiring the technical lead to own the infrastructure.

You are joining as the primary technical stakeholder. While we utilize external partners for the initial codebase development, you are the Architect who owns the master plan, validates engineering standards, and holds the keys to the infrastructure.

Your mandate is twofold:

• Manage the Build: Oversee the external Systems Integrator to ensure the Node.js middleware, API wrappers and automations are built to our specifications.
• Own the Evolution: Once the system is live, you take full ownership of the platform, optimizing the architecture for scale and leading the transition toward internalizing our engineering capabilities.

• Serve as the primary technical counterpart to our external Systems Integrator. You will review and approve OpenAPI (Swagger) specifications and schema designs before implementation.
• Enforce the architectural separation between the Administrative State (Node.js/Postgres) and the Execution Risk State (Rithmic/TT) to ensure system resilience.
• Audit Deployment Standards:
  Audit the code delivery pipelines (CI/CD). Ensure the agency is using proper version control (Git) and automated deployment methods, not manual updates.
• Own User Acceptance Testing (UAT):
  You are responsible for validating the system against edge cases. You will simulate failures (Example: Rithmic disconnects, latency spikes) to ensure the agency’s code recovers gracefully before we go live.

• Manage the AWS environment. You own the root credentials and configuration for EC2, RDS, S3, and AWS Global Accelerator.
• Security & Hardening:
  Implement best practices for DDOS mitigation (AWS WAF), IP whitelisting, and secure management of API keys/secrets.
• Maintain the Amazon RDS (Postgre
  
  SQL) database. You are responsible for data integrity. You must be comfortable writing SQL queries to investigate user states, reconcile transaction logs, and generate ad‑hoc reports.
• Monitor system health via Cloud Watch, tracking API latency, error rates, and database performance.

• Manage the automation bus (Zapier Enterprise). You will oversee the complex logic flows that trigger user provisioning, contract generation (Docu Sign), and payroll updates (Rippling).
• Troubleshoot integration failures. When a webhook fails or data desyncs between Stripe and the database, you are the investigator who identifies the root cause in the JSON payload or server logs.
• Manage API credentials and connectivity for our institutional execution partners:
  Trading Technologies, Rithmic, CQG, and Meta Trader 5.
• Operational Resilience:
  Markets operate 23/5. You must be willing to act as the escalation point for critical infrastructure outages during active market sessions.
• Act as the lead investigator for outages, diagnosing if the issue is a database lock, a code deployment error, or a vendor failure.

• Partner with the founder on the technical roadmap from our current Year 1 architecture (Node.js/Zapier) toward our Year 2 goals of High‑Performance Compute (HPC) and internalized engineering.
• Identify bottlenecks in the initial build and architect solutions for higher throughput as our user base scales to 5,000+ traders.

• No Black Boxes: You demand to know how the system works under the hood. You are not satisfied until you understand the data flow from the frontend button click to the…