Staff Engineer, Trading Automation and Backend Platforms

Flow Traders is looking for a Staff Engineer to lead the architectural and technical direction for Trading Automation and Backend Engineering teams in Amsterdam. The role involves defining long-term technical architecture, mentoring engineers, and partnering with trading and operations teams to drive automation and reduce operational risk.

• Define and own the long-term technical architecture for our trading automation, risk, and post-trade platforms.
• Translate complex, ambiguous business problems into clear, executable technical roadmaps.
• Architect scalable, event-driven systems optimized for high throughput, data integrity, and reliability.
• Elevate engineering standards across the organization, focusing on system design, observability, reliability, and scalability.
• Act as an IC multiplier: mentor senior engineers, guide tech leads, and drive technical alignment across fragmented systems.
• Lead efforts to responsibly decommission legacy systems in favor of modern, scalable services.
• Partner closely with trading, quant, risk, and operations teams to align technical choices with business value.
• Drive automation in post-trade and middle-office workflows (allocations, settlements, reconciliations) to drastically reduce operational risk.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record operating at a Staff, Principal, or cross-team Lead level.
• Proven ability to influence senior technical and business stakeholders and drive consensus across multiple teams.
• Deep expertise in building distributed, high-performance, and highly reliable backend systems.
• Strong proficiency in at least one (or more) core backend language (Python, Go, C++, or Java).
• Experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Databricks, Dataproc) and data pipelines.
• Solid understanding of modern infrastructure, observability, and cloud platforms.
• Deep knowledge of specific financial workflows (ETF creation/redemption, clearing, custody).
• Experience with financial reference data, symbology, or instrument modeling.
• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks (MiFID II, EMIR, SFTR) and their data lineage requirements.
• Solid background in financial services, trading, or market making.
• Strong working knowledge of the trading lifecycle (order flow, execution, and post-trade/settlement flows).

• Flow Academy and opportunities to attend domain-related conferences
• Daily catered lunch, great coffee, and a fully stocked kitchen and snack bar
• In-house Bar and Lounge with arcade, table tennis, billiards, and game consoles
• Company boat
• In-house gym and sessions with our nutritionist or personal trainer
• Bi-weekly massages
• Annual company trip and a variety of events throughout the year, such as the New Years Event
• Global rotations across our offices worldwide