Engineering Team Lead, Trading Platform (Rust)

The role

We're hiring an Engineering Team Lead to run a whole direction. You'll lead a small cross-functional team that builds a real part of our trading platform, and what we care about is whether that work moves the business. This is a management role at its core. You'll decide what the team does next, cut the scope that isn't worth it, clear the blockers, and stay close enough to the work to answer for all of it. That includes the messy parts outside your team's lane when getting to production depends on them. A product nobody uses is a failure here, however clean the code was. Whether you write code yourself is up to you, but it's not what the job is about.

Requirements won't always land on your desk fully formed. Most of the time you'll go dig them out yourself: sit with the traders and whoever else has a stake, work out what actually matters, and turn that into a plan the team can build against.

What you'll do

• Own a direction. Turn business goals into a roadmap and a backlog the team can act on, and answer for the result.
• Keep the backlog honest. Prioritize, drop the low-value work, and hold the team's focus on what moves PnL or takes out cost and risk.
• Take the important initiatives from idea to production and through the shaky first weeks after launch. You own the planning and the alignment as much as the build.
• Clear blockers yourself. Lean on your peers when you have to, and close a gap in someone else's area if that's what it takes to ship.
• Pull requirements straight from the people who'll use what you build, and turn them into concrete technical calls.
• Make the trade-offs between speed, quality, cost, and flexibility, and stand behind them.
• Keep delivery predictable and quality high. Real tests, the checks that matter, docs and runbooks, and no reopens.
• Lead the people well. Give regular, direct, useful feedback. Keep the team in the loop on what's happening around them. Watch how people are doing and head off trouble early. Keep them motivated and working as one team.
• Own how the team looks from outside: demos, reporting, how you show up in Slack, and the experience of everyone who depends on you.

Qualifications

• A solid engineering background in trading, in any domain: crypto, HFT, MFT. You know how trading systems actually work, and you've worked close to the business side of them.
• Real experience leading a team or running a direction. You've set priorities, made the call on scope, and carried the delivery.
• You're fine with ambiguity and with priorities that change. When something's unclear, you go find the answer and keep things moving.
• You think about the business first. You judge success by impact on PnL, cost, or risk, and you steer the team toward things that get used.
• Strong communication. You keep everyone on the same page about context, scope, and timelines, and people trust what your team signs up for.
• Comfortable with our tech context. The whole stack is in Rust, and you should be able to reason about the platform, follow technical discussions, and make sound calls with your engineers even if you're not writing the code.

Nice to have

• Hands-on time with LLMs and AI-assisted development. We use modern AI tooling heavily and are rolling it out across the company. Real interest counts here even without production experience.
• You've introduced a process or a practice somewhere that spread past your own team.