Senior Rapid Application Engineer

Internal Job Level: Senior Associate

Reports to: Rapid Application Development Manager

In this role you will be working with the Product, Infrastructure, QA, and Operations teams to solve complex problems ike our Low Latency team who build the exchange engine itself, the RAD (Rapid Application Development) team lives at the intersection of troubleshooting, innovation, and operational efficiency. You’ll be investigating the toughest production issues, validating new trading technology approaches through rapid prototyping, and building the internal tools and test frameworks that keep Aquis running smoothly.

You’ll be part of a small, high-impact team that combines detective work with creative engineering. One day you'll be diagnosing an intermittent issue in how we handle high-volume order processing; the next, you'll be building a POC for a new trading feature or designing a performance test suite that simulates real market stress. You thrive in environments where problems are ambiguous, priorities shift quickly, and your ability to communicate findings clearly to non-technical teams (QA, Product, Sales) is as important as the code you write.

To succeed as a Senior RAD Engineer, you will be a proponent of agile principles and modern software best practices. You can produce detailed technical work in OOP and collaborate effectively with other development teams to produce code of high quality. Ideally, you will have worked in critical systems development and have direct experience investigating and resolving production issues in high-performance environments.

You should be comfortable with operational thinking, understanding not just what systems do, but why they fail and how to prevent it.

Lead rapid prototyping and validation efforts: Design and implement proof-of-concept solutions for new trading algorithms and system approaches, with emphasis on speed-to-market and iterative feedback from stakeholders.

Drive troubleshooting investigations: Investigate complex production issues, performance anomalies, and system failures; establish reproducible test cases and diagnostic harnesses to validate root causes; communicate findings clearly to non-technical teams and document root causes for the broader engineering team.

Build internal tools and frameworks: Develop tools that improve operational efficiency, such as test suites, performance benchmarking frameworks, reproduction environments, diagnostic utilities, and internal dashboards that enable Ops and QA teams to resolve issues faster and validate fixes reliably.

Mentor mid-level RAD engineers: Provide technical guidance and code review for junior team members; help elevate issues appropriately and develop their investigative and prototyping skills.

Establish and maintain RAD engineering standards: Champion best practices for MVP development, testing, deployment automation, and documentation; ensure RAD-produced code meets security and reliability standards despite the emphasis on speed.

Apply deep technical analysis: Use computer science principles, engineering techniques, and mathematical analysis to break down complex problems in trading technology, market data flows, and system performance.

Participate as a Subject Matter Expert: Review and advise on software components, system designs, and architectural decisions; act as the voice of operational realities in engineering discussions.

• 10+ years professional development experience with C++11 or later, building performant, scalable applications in production environments.

• 6+ years hands-on experience with networking fundamentals (UDP, multicast, TCP, etc.), messaging systems, and algorithmic problem-solving.

• 6+ years working on…