Senior Rapid Application Engineer

Referment is working with a regulated European stock exchange operator whose Rapid Application Development (RAD) team sits at the intersection of troubleshooting, prototyping and operational efficiency. Unlike the low-latency team that builds the matching engine itself, this small team investigates the toughest production issues, validates new trading technology through rapid prototyping, and builds the internal tools and test frameworks that keep the exchange running smoothly.

One day you'll be diagnosing an intermittent issue in how high-volume order processing behaves; the next, you'll build a proof of concept for a new trading feature or design a performance test suite that simulates real market stress. You'll establish reproducible test cases and diagnostic harnesses to validate root causes, communicate findings clearly to non-technical teams (QA, Product, Sales), and document root causes for the wider engineering group.

You'll also build internal tools — test suites, benchmarking frameworks, reproduction environments, diagnostic utilities and dashboards — that help Ops and QA resolve issues faster. As a senior member of the team you'll mentor mid-level engineers, set RAD engineering standards for MVP development, testing and deployment automation, and act as a subject-matter expert in design and architecture discussions.

• 10+ years of professional development with C++11 or later, building performant, scalable production applications.
• 6+ years of hands-on networking fundamentals (UDP, multicast, TCP) and messaging systems.
• 6+ years on Linux, including kernel concepts, system tuning and debugging tools (gdb, strace, perf).
• Proven production troubleshooting: diagnosing complex issues via logs, memory dumps or instrumentation, and explaining them to mixed audiences.
• Strong CI/CD, automated testing, code review and Git discipline; SQL for querying and analysis.
• Comfortable with Kanban, Jira and shipping MVPs fast without perfectionism stalling progress; proficient with AI coding assistants and LLM-based tooling.

Desirable:
Python and Bash scripting, performance profiling (flame graphs), test infrastructure or load-testing experience, capital markets knowledge (FIX, market data), Docker basics, and time-series or version-controlled database exposure.

This could suit a senior C++ engineer with low-latency or capital markets experience who enjoys detective work as much as greenfield development, and wants a role where investigation and prototyping are the day job rather than a distraction from it.