Principal Engineer - Trading Core

Description

The Pepperstone story started in 2010. We know what it's like to trade the world's markets. Our team describes us as a place for the curious and the driven, and we like to do things a little differently; as a transformative global fintech we're digital, nimble, connected, and united in our vision to create a better way to trade.

We thrive on progress – for our clients and for ourselves. Our organisational culture is ever-evolving, vibrant, diverse, global and results focused.

You'll find our 700+ team currently across 12 locations and 9 time zones.

The Role  

Our technology team thrives on collaboration, innovation and continuous learning. We encourage fresh thinking, value technical excellence, and give our engineers the autonomy to make a real impact.

Join us as a Principal Engineer – Trading Core and take technical ownership of the heart of Pepperstone's trading platform. Our Java-based trading engine powers order management, pricing, market data, risk management and client APIs—processing real client orders and funds in real time.

You'll define the technical direction for a mission-critical, regulated platform, driving its evolution towards a more scalable and resilient architecture while keeping a live trading system running 24/7.

As a senior individual contributor, you'll lead through architecture, design and code—not people management—setting engineering standards, solving complex technical challenges and helping shape the future of Pepperstone's trading platform.

This role reports to the Head of Engineering for the Trading Platform team. We support flexible working. This position can be performed from both a mix of at our office and from home. Your manager will share details and expectations of your team’s regular cadence of working locations.

As our Principal Engineer – Trading Core, your key responsibilities include, but may not be limited to:

• Architecture ownership: Define the target-state architecture for the trading backend and lead a pragmatic, low-risk evolution toward more modular, independently deployable, and horizontally scalable services.
• Resilience & scale: Strengthen the platform’s ability to scale and fail over safely, making capacity and deployment changes predictable, validated, and reversible.
• Execution quality & latency: Ensure critical paths – risk evaluation, stop-out / close-out, margin, and order execution – behave correctly and with predictable latency, including under peak load and high-volatility market events.
• Engineering standards: Establish patterns, performance budgets, observability, and testing practices for a real-time trading system, and mentor senior engineers.
• Technical leadership: Lead through code and design – write reference implementations, run the hardest investigations, and turn incident learnings into durable architecture.
• Cross-functional partnership: Work closely with SRE/infra, risk, product, pricing, compliance, and the client-facing teams (web, mobile, partner APIs) whose contracts depend on the core.

About you

You are an experienced technical leader who has built and evolved large-scale, business-critical trading platforms. You enjoy solving complex engineering problems, thrive in high-performance environments and are passionate about building resilient systems where every millisecond matters.

You bring:

• Deep expertise building trading-core or execution-engine backends within a broker, exchange or trading venue
• Expert-level Java experience developing high-throughput, low-latency concurrent systems
• Strong hands-on knowledge of trading platform risk management, margin calculations, order execution and real-time financial processing
• Experience designing scalable distributed systems with strong resilience, messaging and failover capabilities
• A proven track record of modernising complex production systems while maintaining availability and stability
• Strong understanding of leveraged trading products, particularly CFDs or related derivatives

Highly desirable

• Experience extending trading platforms with new derivative products or trading functionality
• Experience with event-driven architectures and real-time market data distribution
• Familiarity with FIX protocol and multi-asset trading platforms
• Previous experience within a retail trading, CFD brokerage or trading platform environment

Why you will enjoy working with us

• Competitive salary structure including company bonus scheme
• Flexible and hybrid working
• Remote working option - work from anywhere for up to 4 weeks per year
• 10 days of Company paid sick leave annually  
• 21 days of paid vacation within the first year of employment, increasing to 25 days after one year 
• 3 paid volunteering days per year & Workplace Giving Program
• Comprehensive medical insurance with coverage for your healthcare needs
• Pension fund
• Employee referral bonuses for referring top talent to the company 
• Ongoing personal development & learning opportunities
• Periodic recognition and reward programs for outstanding performance and achievements
• Frequent events and celebrations
• Genuinely collaborative and friendly culture
• Employee Assistance Program & Wellbeing Initiatives
• Convenient and cozy office located near the Limassol Municipal Garden

More About Pepperstone

We’re a regulated online Forex and CFD trading platform. With the scale of a global fintech and the agility of a start-up, we arm our clients with everything they need to take on the global markets with confidence. You will be part of a wider passionate and friendly team, and whilst things may not always go to plan, we learn quickly and move forward with impact. To learn even more visit Pepperstonecareers and www.linkedin.com/company/pepperstone/  

We understand it’s important to do due diligence on a prospective employer, see what our team are saying on Glassdoor. We respect our team members’ experiences and will never pay to remove a negative review.  

Pepperstone is an equal opportunity employer. We are passionate about building a diverse workplace and strongly encourage applications from any background.  

“We are a 2025 Circle Back Initiative Employer – we respond to every applicant”.  

We will be reviewing applications as they come through, so if this is an opportunity that excites you, don't wait. Express your interest by clicking the apply button below as soon as possible.  

Note to external agencies: While we appreciate the efforts of external recruitment agencies, we prefer to engage directly with applicants for this opportunity.  

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