Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Trading Services

About OKX

About the Opportunity

The Trading Systems team builds the mission-critical order, execution, position, and risk infrastructure that powers OKX’s global trading platform. We operate at the intersection of high performance, correctness, resilience, and scale—where every design decision matters.

We are seeking a Senior C++ Software Engineer to lead the design and evolution of our trading counter and core trading systems. This role is for an engineer who combines deep systems expertise with strong ownership: someone who investigates root causes, raises the quality bar across the engineering lifecycle, and turns individual learning into reusable team capability.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Lead the architecture, design, and development of complex, high-performance C++ trading systems.
• Design reliable distributed systems, including consistency, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and resilience strategies across system boundaries.
• Own work end to end—from technical proposals and design reviews through framework refactoring, implementation, deployment, production debugging, replay, and validation.
• Solve low-level systems challenges involving networking, protocols, concurrency, memory management, performance, and operating-system-level behaviour.
• Drive architectural improvements by identifying systemic issues and anti-patterns, such as overly coupled or “God Class” designs, and redesigning components with clear responsibilities.
• Build proactive quality safeguards, including automated testing, failure-injection scenarios, stability validation, monitoring, and replay-based verification.
• Design controlled experiments to validate architectural assumptions and diagnose complex production issues beyond surface-level symptoms.
• Work effectively across heterogeneous technology stacks, making sound engineering decisions at language, service, and platform boundaries.
• Independently explore and apply AI-assisted engineering practices across code understanding, solution design, cross-review, incident analysis, test validation, and knowledge capture.
• Raise engineering standards through thoughtful code reviews, technical discussions, and continuous improvements to development practices.
• Mentor engineers and share practical knowledge through documentation, playbooks, technical sessions, and reusable frameworks.

What We Look For In You

• Bachelor’s degree or above in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related STEM field; equivalent practical experience is also valued.
• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with substantial experience building production C++ systems.
• Strong experience designing and evolving complex systems, with a clear understanding of architectural trade-offs.
• Proven knowledge of concurrency, multithreading, network programming, and performance optimisation in Linux-based environments.
• Hands-on experience with distributed consistency, high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, or other system-level reliability designs.
• Strong understanding of computer systems fundamentals, including networking protocols, operating systems, memory, storage, and runtime behaviour.
• A track record of taking ownership proactively, from defining the problem to delivering and validating a robust solution.
• Exceptional debugging and analytical ability, with a habit of investigating why issues occur—not simply applying short-term fixes.
• Experience using automated tests, simulation, replay, or comparative experiments to validate system behaviour and reliability.
• Clear communication skills and a collaborative mindset; able to turn experience into documentation, standards, and practices that help the whole team.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with exchange, brokerage, trading counter, order management, execution, market data, or other low-latency financial systems.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, messaging systems, or high-throughput distributed platforms.
• Familiarity with Rust, Java, Go, Python, or other languages used in multi-language production environments.
• Practical experience applying AI tools to improve software engineering workflows and code quality.
• Experience working with globally distributed, cross-functional engineering teams.