Quantitative Software Engineer Lead

Location: New York, NY

Department: Engineering

Overview

• Role: Quantitative Software Engineer Lead
• 5 days a week in NYC HQ
• Base salary: $225k-375k
• Equity: Competitive Initial Equity Package + refreshers
• 4+ Years of Experience

About Pillar

Pillar is building the next-generation commodity risk management stack for the $10T physical economy. We combine real-time marketdata with AI-powered exposure modeling and automated trade generation to arm operators with precise protection from volatility. From instant execution to continuous monitoring, alerts, and recommendations, Pillar turns complex market risk into a fully managed, always-on hedging engine.

We were founded in 2023 by the youngest macro market-maker at Barclays and a trading systems engineer at Coinbase, and have raised over $20M in capital from Andreesen Horowitz (a16z), Crucible Capital, Neo, Crossbeam Venture Partners and more.

What You’ll Do

• Architect the future of commodity trading infrastructure: Lead development of our trading system as we start scaling in new markets and onboarding new customers.
• Engineer at the edge of performance: Build and optimize low-latency distributed systems, ensuring our platform minimizes risk and gets optimal prices on fills.
• Build and mentor a world-class team: Shape our engineering culture, hire and mentor talented engineers, and collaborate directly with founders to solve some of the most challenging problems in financial technology.
• Own critical systems end-to-end: From market data ingestion to order execution and risk monitoring, you'll have autonomy over mission-critical infrastructure that keeps our clients' businesses running 24/7.

What We are Looking For

• Deep understanding of data structures, algorithms, design patterns, and core systems fundamentals.
• Extensive experience architecting and building complex financial systems with a focus on building and scaling low latency event driven distributed systems
• Strong ownership and teamwork, ability to work collaboratively to unblock work, drive momentum, and make sure important things get over the finish line.
• Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, learn quickly, and independently figure things out in fast-moving environments.
• Exceptional problem solving skills and ability to break down and tackle complex tasks.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with Golang, Python, C++, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Kafka, AWS
• Experience building trading systems
• Domain experience with derivatives, crypto, equities or other financial products

Benefits

• 💰 Competitive Salary & Equity
• 📈 401(k) Program
• ⚕️ Health, Dental, Vision and Life Insurance
• ⌚ Unlimited PTO and Flexible Hours
• 🍣 Paid lunch, coffee, snacks (and dinner if you’re staying late)
• 🏋️ Monthly Gym Stipend
• 🌄 Regular Team Off-Sites