Senior/Staff Software Engineer, C++ - Trading Service

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.