---
title: 'Lead Software Developer – Options Market Making at Squarepoint Capital'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-software-developer-options-market-making-squarepoint-capital-new-york-7tmh05n8wvxx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-13'
---

# Lead Software Developer – Options Market Making at Squarepoint Capital

- **Company:** Squarepoint Capital
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Posted:** 2026-10-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13
- **Apply:** https://www.squarepoint-capital.com/open-opportunities?id=8268176&gh_jid=8268176

## Job description

Position Overview:

We are seeking a highly experienced Lead Software Developer to design, build, and optimize the core technology behind real-time option quote management across U.S. equity options markets.

The candidate must have a proven track record and hands-on experience in the following areas:

- Design and develop a high-performance, event-driven options quoting engine capable of maintaining large numbers of simultaneous two-sided quotes across symbols, strikes, expirations, and exchanges.
- Build efficient quote lifecycle management, including new quote creation, quote replacement, quote and mass quote cancellation, quote refresh, and quote re-entry.
- Implement intelligent quote prioritization, throttling, and backpressure handling when exchange or internal message-rate limits are reached, including per-venue rate budgets, burst controls, quote aging policies, cancel/replace prioritization, and graceful degradation under peak market-data or volatility events.
- Apply strong knowledge of U.S. options market microstructure and exchange matching engine, gateway behavior, including quote-entry protocols, session management, acknowledgments, rejects, recovery, and venue-specific latency, throughput, and throttling constraints.
- Develop high-performance C++ components using lock-free and low-contention data structures, cache-aware data layouts, efficient CPU/core utilization, NUMA awareness, kernel and network-stack optimizations, and high-performance IPC.
- Profile and tune the full quote-to-exchange path to reduce gateway latency and maximize sustained throughput, including exchange session connectivity, serialization/deserialization overhead, batching trade-offs, TCP/UDP/network-stack behavior, pacing logic, queue depth monitoring, latency distribution analysis, and elimination of latency spikes, synchronization bottlenecks, and throughput constraints.

Must haves

- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in options electronic market making, with a strong focus on end-to-end quote lifecycle management.
- Strong understanding of CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, caching, concurrency, networking, and Linux performance.
- Demonstrated experience building low-latency, high-throughput, multithreaded systems.
- (Highly preferred) Knowledge of the inner workings of one or multiple US equity option exchanges

## About Squarepoint Capital

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Squarepoint Capital is a leading global quantitative investment manager that uses a rigorous scientific approach and state-of-the-art technology to construct diversified, systematic strategies for institutional clients.
- **Entity Type**: Private (no disclosed external funding; spun out from Barclays in 2014)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2014 (as an independent firm; the underlying business, nQuant, dates back to 2000 within Lehman Brothers and later Barclays)
- **Founders**: Led by four founding partners (names not publicly disclosed); the original founders of nQuant continue to lead Squarepoint today.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Financial Services – Quantitative Investment Management
- **Target customers**: Institutional investors (B2B)
- **Mission / Purpose**: “Achieving high quality returns for our clients” through a systematic, diversified, and research-driven investment platform.

## Products & Services
- **Quantitative Investment Strategies**: A diversified portfolio of systematic strategies spanning multiple asset classes (equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities), trading frequencies (high-frequency to long-term), and global markets. The majority of investments are based on rigorous backtesting on historical data.
- **Technology & Data Platform**: A custom, nimble, and forward-looking software stack that enables seamless integration between research and trading, executing millions of trades per day. Includes low-latency trading systems and a world-class data infrastructure.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue is not publicly disclosed (LinkedIn estimates ~$12M, but this likely underrepresents a firm of this scale; the figure should be treated with caution). The firm is privately held and does not report earnings.
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: No external investors; the firm is privately held by its founding partners. Alumni frequently move to top quant funds and tech companies (e.g., Millennium, Citadel, Qube Research & Technologies, Google, Jump Trading).
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 33.9% year-over-year to approximately 1,801 employees (LinkedIn, 2025). The firm operates 17 offices across 8 countries and is actively hiring across technical, research, and finance roles.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep heritage**: The team’s quantitative roots trace back to 2000, with a proven track record through multiple market cycles.
- **Scientific rigor**: A disciplined, research-first approach that relies on backtesting and systematic execution rather than discretionary bets.
- **Scale and technology**: Executes millions of trades daily using a highly custom, low-latency platform developed in-house.
- **Global diversification**: Strategies span asset classes, geographies, and trading frequencies, reducing reliance on any single market or style.
- **Culture of ownership**: Privately held and led by its founding partners, fostering long-term thinking and accountability.

## Strategic Focus
- **Diversification**: Continuously expanding into new asset classes, trading frequencies, and geographies.
- **Technology investment**: Ongoing development of proprietary software and data infrastructure to maintain a competitive edge in research and execution.
- **Talent acquisition**: Aggressively hiring quantitative researchers, software engineers (C++, Python), platform engineers, and operations specialists across global offices.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Collaboration across teams, a flat structure with a strong sense of ownership and accountability, and a focus on intellectual curiosity.
- **Work environment**: In-office for most roles (offices in New York, Boston, London, Paris, Singapore, Bangalore, etc.). Some roles offer a remote work program, but the majority require physical presence.
- **Benefits**: Generous parental leave, health insurance (medical, dental, vision), 401(K) matching, disability and life insurance, paid sick days, generous PTO, paid volunteer time, free snacks and drinks. Offices are designed for in-person collaboration.
- **Engineering culture**: Technology is considered core to the business; engineers work closely with quantitative researchers to build and optimize trading systems. Emphasis on C++, Python, Kubernetes, and low-latency systems.
- **Growth trajectory**: Rapid headcount growth and a global footprint offer opportunities for career advancement and international mobility.

## Sources
1. [squarepoint-capital.com](https://www.squarepoint-capital.com/)
2. [squarepoint-capital.com/about](https://squarepoint-capital.com/about)
3. [linkedin.com/company/squarepoint-capital](https://ca.linkedin.com/company/squarepoint-capital)
4. [builtin.com/company/squarepoint-capital](https://builtin.com/company/squarepoint-capital)
5. [job-boards.greenhouse.io/squarepointcapital](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/squarepointcapital)

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