Principal Software Engineer

Role Summary

We are hiring a founding engineer for the firms proprietary investment platform in effect the operating system for our trading and portfolio management desks. Global X operates a large and growing ETF platform across multiple markets. Our investment desk runs on proprietary technology built in-house for portfolio management trading and the operational workflow around them and we are investing significantly in advancing it as the product range and the number of markets grow.

The engineering problems here are genuinely interesting ones. Real-time market data under back-pressure. Sub-second recalculation across a continuously changing book. Idempotent posting to external systems of record where a duplicate or dropped message has direct financial consequences. Deterministic replay from an immutable event log. Multiple markets calendars and time zones. And a correctness standard set by a regulated business rather than by convenience.

This role will own services end to end design implementation deployment and production across a Java service tier and a Python quantitative tier on AWS. The decisions you make here shape the platform for years and set the engineering standard for the team that grows around it.

Agentic coding tools are core to how we work and AI is core to what we are building: the platform is designed so that agents are first-class participants in it rather than a capability layered on afterward. If you have been looking for a role where the scope is wide the problems are hard and the tooling keeps up with your ambition this is that role.

Key Responsibilities

• Platform & Distributed Systems Engineering

  • Design build and operate containerized services on AWS across a Java service tier and a Python analytical tier owning them in production and in development.

  • Build for continuous operation through partial failure. A market data feed drops a counterparty is unreachable a batch arrives late the platform degrades in defined observable ways rather than stopping because the desk depends on it every trading day.

  • Design idempotent exactly-once semantics wherever the platform posts to external systems of record and keep the real-time calculation path fast under continuous change with heavier analytical work off the critical path.

  • Implement the event-sourced audit trail and immutability guarantees that let any calculated value or user action be reconstructed exactly and make deterministic replay a system property rather than an aspiration.

  • Shape APIs around the workflows users actually perform with step-wise state reversibility and undo as first-class capabilities.

  • Build for multiple markets calendars and time zones. The desks this platform serves do not all trade the same hours and the design should not assume they do.

• AI-Native Engineering

  • Build the platform so AI agents are first-class participants structured context explicit action boundaries and provenance on every state change treated as cross-cutting infrastructure alongside logging and observability rather than as a feature.

  • Use agentic coding tools as a primary instrument of delivery. We scope ambitiously because of them and we would rather give a strong engineer more surface area than more process.

  • Own the harness as well as the output: steering documents specifications test fixtures and evaluation criteria that make agents genuinely productive on this codebase rather than generically capable.

  • Raise the review bar to match. When generation is cheap verification is where craft lives and correctness security and maintainability remain yours.

  • Track the tooling frontier and tell us when it moves. Work that took a week last quarter may not this quarter and we want a team that notices and re-plans rather than continuing out of habit.

• Domain & Stakeholder Partnership

  • Work directly with portfolio managers traders operations and compliance to understand the investment workflow in depth then translate it into service boundaries and API contracts.

  • Hold the line on numerical correctness with validation rigorous enough that results can be relied on without a second opinion.

  • Partner with the desk through each stage of delivery: investigate differences separate genuine defects from expected variation and drive them to resolution.

• Foundation & Growth

  • Set the standard for testing CI/CD observability and secrets hygiene in a regulated environment where audit evidence is a deliverable in its own right.

  • Contribute architecture decision records and leave a codebase legible to both the engineers and the agents that work on it next.

  • Help shape how the engineering function scales hiring standards mentorship and the operating model as the team expands around the platform.

Qualifications

• 8 years building and operating production backend services including ownership of systems where failure had real consequences.

• Deep experience with distributed fault-tolerant systems: event-driven architectures idempotency and delivery guarantees back-pressure graceful degradation and the failure modes that only appear in production.

• Expert Java (modern LTS releases Spring Boot) and strong production Python and comfortable moving between the two rather than specializing in one.

• Agentic coding tools (Claude Code Codex Cursor or equivalent) as part of your daily production work. We are interested in how you use them where they accelerate you where they mislead and how you verify.

• Cloud-native engineering on AWS: containerized compute relational data caching queueing and eventing and infrastructure-as-code.

• Experience in a domain where correctness was non-negotiable financial calculation accounting billing or similar with the testing discipline that implies.

• A track record of owning systems end to end and of setting technical direction others follow.

• Strong written communication. Specifications and design documents are load-bearing here for the humans and for the tooling.

Nice to Have

• Buy-side or asset management domain: positions and holdings transactions corporate actions benchmarks and index data NAV and the order lifecycle. ETF or 1940-Act fund experience is a strong plus.

• Real-time market data and execution vendor integration (Bloomberg FactSet or equivalents); FIX protocol experience.

• Building or consuming MCP servers tool interfaces or other agent-facing surfaces over production systems.

• Spec-driven development workflows and maintaining agent steering documentation across a multi-service codebase.

• Cross-language service interop; cloud data warehouse and distributed cache technologies.

• Engineering in a regulated environment: SEC record keeping (Rule 204-2) Regulation S-P SOC 1 controls and the evidentiary questions raised by AI-assisted change.

Compensation Range

• $230000-$245000 plus annual bonus

Global X does not accept unsolicited resumes or candidate profiles from recruitment agencies search firms or third-party recruiters.

Compensation & Benefits

Global X offers a competitive total compensation package including base salary annual performance bonus and a comprehensive benefits program:

• Competitive base salary with annual performance-based bonus

• Comprehensive medical dental and vision insurance

• 401(k) retirement plan with company matching

• Generous paid time off and company holidays

• Professional development and continuing education opportunities

• Hybrid work flexibility

• Life and disability insurance

• Wellness programs and employee assistance program (EAP)

About Global X

Global X was founded in 2008. For more than fifteen years our mission has been empowering investors with unexplored and intelligent solutions. Our product lineup features a wide range of ETF strategies and $78.1 billion in assets under management. While we are distinguished for our Thematic Growth Income and International Access ETFs we also offer Core and other funds to suit a wide range of investment objectives. Explore our ETFs research and insights and more at.

Global X is a member of Mirae Asset Financial Group (Mirae Asset) a global leader in financial services with $803 billion in assets under management worldwide. Mirae Asset has an extensive global ETF platform ranging across the U.S. Australia Brazil Canada Colombia Europe Hong Kong India Japan Korea and Vietnam.

Required Experience:

Staff IC