Software Engineer (Python)

Vola Dynamics is the world's most sophisticated software and research company for advanced options analytics. Our volatility fitter and ultra-fast option pricers are the market standard, powering decisions at the world’s leading hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, market makers, and global banks.

We're seeking a data-oriented Software Engineer to play a pivotal role in developing our next-generation streaming data infrastructure from the ground up. This is a rare chance to design and build a modern trading analytics platform from scratch—one that will power cutting-edge applications built on Vola's advanced options analytics library.

We’re a small, tight-knit, highly technical team that values intellectual rigor, collaboration, and doing good work. You’ll take on broad responsibilities and contribute to work with real-world impact from day one. We help each other build, share ideas openly, and work together to get things done.

We're a hybrid team, in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What You'll Do

• Design high-performance APIs: Design and implement robust, scalable, real-time and historical user-facing data APIs in C++, Python, and Rust.
• Build powerful internal tools: Build powerful internal tools (GUIs, TUIs, etc.) for real-time command & control and meta-analytics that accelerate research and streamline the path from research to production.
• Develop and maintain production data systems: Develop scalable systems to ingest, transform, and analyze real-time and historical options market data and deploy these on our distributed computing infrastructure.
• Maintain our data processing library: Architect, build, and maintain the data processing library underpinning our streaming analytics.
• Use AI: AI development tools (Claude Code, Codex) are a standard part of how we build software here, and we'll expect you to use them well.
• Own our tech stack: Own and evolve a rapidly growing distributed infrastructure spanning bare-metal servers, self-hosted Kubernetes, and cloud services.

Who You Are

• You earned a BS or MS degree in Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics, Data Science, Engineering, or another quantitative discipline.
• You have between 2 years and 6 years of experience in relevant roles working on production data-oriented systems in Python.
• You have experience designing, building, and maintaining scaleable, fault-tolerant user-facing APIs for data-focused services or systems.
• You have hands-on experience deploying orchestration frameworks and containerization technologies such as Dagster, Airflow, Prefect, Docker, or Kubernetes.
• You are skilled at understanding, transforming, analyzing, visualizing, and debugging large numerical datasets.
• You are comfortable with using agent-driven development workflows to generate high-quality code.
• You consistently apply software and data engineering best practices, including version control, automated testing, and thorough documentation.
• You explain your thinking clearly, in code, review comments, design discussions, and writing.
• You work well independently, and just as well as part of a small, hybrid team.
• You hold current authorization to work in the US.

Our Stack
Python, C++, ClickHouse, Kubernetes, Kafka (Redpanda), Dagster, and Rust.

Nice to Have

• Active open-source contributor in the Python, C++, or Rust data ecosystems.
• Experience working with observability/tracing systems or production DevOps workflows.
• Professional experience working in a systems language (C++, Rust, Java, C#, etc.)
• Experience working on an options market making or derivatives infrastructure, or another quantitative finance background.

Compensation: $165K - $190K