Senior Java Software Engineer

Founded by two engineers, Swissquote makes trading opportunities accessible to everyone and we challenge everything that makes traditional banking irrelevant.
The Swissquote Tech Hub in Bucharest is meant to create a new high-calibre location for the Swissquote engineering group. The Tech Hub is structured around the design, build and maintenance of innovative and reliable systems, products and services. Operating within a collaborative Agile environment, we aim to deliver effective solutions to the business and our customers using our evolving platforms.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our engineering team working on business-critical systems within the institutional domain.

In this role, you will contribute to the design, development, evolution, and operational reliability of backend applications supporting trading activities and integrations with internal and external systems.

Beyond strong software engineering skills, we are looking for someone who can take ownership of complex topics, understand the broader business and technical context, challenge solutions constructively, and collaborate effectively across teams.

The role requires a strong engineering mindset, with particular attention to system reliability, maintainability, performance, production readiness, and technical quality.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain reliable backend services supporting trading-related applications and workflows.
• Take end-to-end ownership of technical topics, from requirements clarification and solution design to implementation, deployment, and production follow-up.
• Contribute to the architecture and evolution of existing systems, identifying opportunities to improve scalability, reliability, maintainability, and performance.
• Analyze complex production issues and participate actively in troubleshooting and root-cause analysis.
• Work with APIs and system integrations, including interfaces used for communication between trading platforms, internal systems, and external providers.
• Contribute to the implementation and maintenance of integrations based on industry protocols such as FIX where applicable.
• Ensure appropriate handling of data consistency, transactional behavior, error scenarios, retries, and failure recovery.
• Work with relational databases and contribute to the design, review, and safe rollout of database changes.
• Produce clean, maintainable, well-tested code following engineering best practices.
• Review code and technical solutions proposed by other engineers and provide constructive feedback.
• Contribute actively to technical grooming by helping clarify requirements, dependencies, risks, and implementation approaches before development starts.
• Collaborate closely with engineers, product stakeholders, support teams, and other technical teams to coordinate dependencies and resolve cross-team topics.
• Support production systems and contribute to maintaining a high level of service availability and operational stability.
• Contribute to improving engineering practices, development processes, technical documentation, observability, and automation within the team.
• Mentor less experienced engineers and contribute to raising the overall technical level of the team.

Technical Skills & Experience

Required

• Strong professional experience in backend software development, ideally in Java-based environments.
• Strong proficiency in Java and its ecosystem, at least 7 years
• Strong understanding of object-oriented programming, clean code principles, software design, and common design patterns.
• Experience designing and developing REST APIs and service-to-service integrations.
• Strong understanding of understanding of concurrency, multithreading, transaction management, error handling and application resilience.
• Strong knowledge of SQL and relational databases.
• Strong experience troubleshooting production issues and performing root-cause analysis across applications, databases and system integrations.
• Good understanding of concurrency, transaction management, error handling, and application resilience.
• Experience with automated testing, including unit and integration testing.
• Experience with modern software delivery practices, version control, code review, CI/CD pipelines, and automated deployments.
• Ability to understand and safely modify existing complex or legacy systems.
• Ability to assess technical trade-offs and propose pragmatic solutions rather than simply implementing predefined approaches.
• Enthusiastic for AI adoption

Nice to Have

• Previous experience in financial services, brokerage, trading platforms, or capital markets.
• Knowledge of the FIX protocol and electronic trading workflows.
• Understanding of trading concepts such as orders, executions, market data, positions, instruments, and trade lifecycle.
• Experience with asynchronous messaging and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with technologies such as Kafka or other asynchronous messaging platforms.
• Experience with Spring / Spring Boot.
• Experience with containerized applications and orchestration platforms.
• Knowledge of monitoring, observability, and production diagnostics tools.
• Experience working on high-availability or business-critical systems.
• Understanding of performance-sensitive or low-latency application design.
• Hands on experience with agentic models

Engineering Mindset

We expect a Senior Engineer to go beyond implementing individual tickets.

You should be comfortable:

• Asking the right questions before starting implementation;
• Understanding why a change is required, not only what needs to be changed;
• Identifying hidden dependencies and potential production risks;
• Challenging requirements or proposed solutions when appropriate;
• Proposing pragmatic technical alternatives;
• Distinguishing between tactical fixes and sustainable solutions;
• Taking responsibility for the quality and operational impact of your changes;
• Driving technical topics forward when coordination across teams or stakeholders is required.

Collaboration & Seniority Expectations

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy while collaborating closely with the rest of the team.

You should be able to:

• Communicate technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders;
• Facilitate technical discussions and help the team reach sound engineering decisions;
• Provide meaningful code reviews rather than only checking implementation details;
• Support colleagues when dealing with difficult technical problems;
• Identify when additional expertise or alignment is required;
• Contribute constructively during grooming, planning, incident analysis, and retrospectives;
• Balance delivery speed with engineering quality and operational risk.

What we offer: 

• Modern, international work environment built on collaboration, flexibility and respect 
• Hybrid way of working (1 day per week in the office) 
• Exciting opportunity to boost your career and develop solid banking and Fintech business expertise 
• 25+ annual days off 
• Annual bonus 
• Medical insurance 
• Meal tickets 
• Shares plan 
• Bookster