Senior Software Engineer, Prime

About the role

<div class="content-intro"><h2>Join us in building the future of finance.</h2> <p>Our mission is to democratize finance for all. <a href="https://www.cerulli.com/press-releases/cerulli-anticipates-124-trillion-in-wealth-will-transfer-through-2048" target="_blank">An estimated $124 trillion of assets</a> will be inherited by younger generations in the next two decades. The largest transfer of wealth in human history. If you’re ready to be at the epicenter of this historic cultural and financial shift, keep reading.</p></div><h2>About the team + role</h2> <p>We are building an elite team, applying frontier technologies to the world’s biggest financial problems.<strong> </strong>We’re looking for bold thinkers. Sharp problem-solvers. Builders who are wired to make an impact. Robinhood isn’t a place for complacency, it’s where ambitious people do the best work of their careers. We’re a high-performing, fast-moving team with ethics at the center of everything we do. Expectations are high, and so are the rewards. </p> <p>The <strong>Prime team's </strong>mission is to build Bitstamp's prime brokerage for institutional clients — the platform that lets hedge funds, market makers, and professional trading firms fund, trade, borrow against, and settle positions at scale. We build the systems that move real institutional money: cross-venue settlement, credit against collateral, matched-book lending, and the bridge that brings tokenized securities to our order book. These are correctness-critical systems where a wrong answer can't be cheaply undone — getting them right is the whole job.</p> <p>As a <strong>Senior Software Engineer</strong>, you will own the design and end-to-end delivery of the systems at the core of that mission. You'll lead other engineers through problems of high ambiguity, set the technical bar for how we build for failure and not just the happy path, and be a go-to technical partner for the team, our stakeholders, and our counterparts across Robinhood.</p> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="5369">This role is based in our <strong>London office, with in-person attendance expected at least 3 days per week.</strong> At Robinhood, we believe in the power of in-person work to accelerate progress, spark innovation, and strengthen community. Our office experience is intentional, energizing, and designed to fully support high-performing teams. <strong>Requires participation in an on-call rotation</strong> to support business needs.</span></p> <h2><span data-markdown-start-index="5774">What you’ll do</span></h2> <ul> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="5791">Lead the design and end-to-end delivery of large, high-complexity systems that move institutional money — settlement, on-exchange credit, matched-book lending, and cross-venue order flows — from spec through production and on-call.</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="6025">Author detailed technical designs and break work into reviewable steps, guiding other engineers and making failure states, invariants, and recovery explicit before the happy path ships.</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="6213">Shape the team's technical roadmap and architecture, advocating for the reliability, correctness, and risk-control work that keeps client money safe.</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="6365">Uplevel the team through deep, design-focused code review and mentorship, and serve as a reliable technical point of contact for partner teams and our Robinhood counterparts.</span></p> </li> </ul> <h2><span data-markdown-start-index="6543">What you bring</span></h2> <ul> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="6560">A track record of independently delivering complex, high-ambiguity backend projects with long-term impact, operating them in production and owning every line you ship.</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="6730">Hands-on experience building financial systems — user balances, ledgers, risk engines, settlement, or payments — where correctness is non-negotiable and mistakes are expensive.</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="6909">Deep expertise in distributed state across boundaries, transactional integrity, idempotency, and exactly-once semantics.</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="7032">Strong design judgment: you enumerate the failure paths, name your invariants, and can point at the constraint, test, or alert that enforces each one.</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="7185">Excellent communication: you drive alignment across teams and product partners, give substantive design-level review feedback, and mentor engineers to raise the bar around you. You're fluent in a modern backend language — we work primarily in Python (Django) and Go.</span></p> </li> </ul> <h2><span data-markdown-start-index="7455">What we offer</span></h2> <ul> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="7471">Challenging, high-impact work to grow your career</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="7522">Performance driven compensation with multipliers for outsized impact, bonus programs, and equity ownership</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="7630">Top tier benefits to fuel your work, including supplemental health insurance, ancillary insurance, and mental health support programs</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="7765">Access to the best AI tools on the market and continuous AI skill-building for every employee, technical or not</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="7879">Lifestyle wallet - a highly flexible employer-paid benefits spending account expenses beyond traditional benefits such as wellness, childcare, learning, and more.</span></p> </li> <li> <p><span data-markdown-start-index="8043">Time off to recharge including company holidays, paid time off, sick time, paid volunteer time off, parental leave, and more!</span></p> <