Product Engineering - Team Lead

Job description

## About Wintermute Wintermute is one of the largest crypto-native algorithmic trading companies in digital assets. We provide liquidity algorithmically across cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms, a broad range of OTC trading products as well as support high profile blockchain projects and traditional financial insituitions moving into crypto. We actively participate in the development of the blockchain ecosystem through investments, partnerships, and incubation of projects. Wintermute was founded in 2017 by industry leaders and has successfully navigated multiple crypto industry cycles. Culturally, we combine the best of the two worlds: the technology standards of high-frequency trading firms in traditional markets and the innovative and entrepreneurial culture of technology startups. Read more [here.](https://wintermute.com/about) ## Working at Wintermute We are looking for a Team Lead to serve as the technical authority within our Product team. Think of this as a mini-CTO role: you will own architecture decisions, set technical direction, and drive the engineering culture for the team building Wintermute's client-facing and internal trading platforms. You will have significant autonomy to shape how we build, what technologies we adopt, and how we scale our systems to handle the data volumes and performance demands of a world-class trading operation. You'll lead a team of talented engineers while staying deeply hands-on with the codebase. ### What you will work on: - Define and own the technical architecture for Wintermute’s trading products, client-facing portals, and internal applications — making the key technology and design decisions that determine how these systems are built and scaled. - Lead and mentor a team of engineers across the full stack, setting standards for code quality, review processes, and engineering best practices. - Drive technical strategy and roadmap alongside product leadership, translating business requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions. - Architect systems that handle high data volumes, real-time streaming, and low-latency interactions — the kind of challenges you’d find on a trading platform processing millions of events per second. - Oversee frontend experience across the full customer lifecycle, from onboarding portals to real-time trading dashboards. - Work cross-functionally with product, marketing, trading, and backend engineering teams to ensure alignment and delivery. - Establish and evolve engineering processes — sprint planning, incident response, deployment pipelines — that let the team ship with confidence and speed. ### Hard skills requirements: - 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a technical leadership role (tech lead, engineering lead, or similar). - Proven track record of making architecture decisions for complex, data-intensive applications — ideally in trading platforms, financial services, or other high-throughput/low-latency environments. - Deep experience building and scaling real-time, high-data-volume systems (e.g., trading dashboards, live data feeds, streaming analytics, order management systems). - Strong command of the modern frontend stack: TypeScript, React, Node.js — and the ability to evaluate and adopt new technologies as needed. - Hands-on server-side experience: building and maintaining backend services, APIs, and data pipelines using languages such as Node.js, Python, Go, or similar. - Solid understanding of end-to-end system architecture: APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, WebSockets, message queues, databases, and how frontend and backend systems work together in high-performance environments. - Experience with infrastructure and DevOps fundamentals: CI/CD, cloud platforms, CDN, monitoring/observability, and deployment strategies. - Strong understanding of security best practices (OWASP, authentication/authorization patterns, secure data handling) — especially in a financial context. - Experience hiring, mentoring, and growing engineers — building a high-performing team, not just managing one. ### Nice to have: - Experience at a trading firm, fintech, or any environment where milliseconds matter and data volumes are extreme. - Familiarity with algorithmic trading concepts and financial market infrastructure. - Experience with performance optimization at scale — profiling, caching strategies, efficient rendering of large datasets. - Experience with backend technologies beyond Node.js (Python, Go, Rust, or similar) for performance-critical services. ### Write to us if you: - Love making hard technical decisions and seeing them pay off at scale. - Get energized by building high-performance systems that handle serious data volumes. - Want to shape the technical direction of a product team, not just execute on someone else’s plan. - Are passionate about engineering culture — code quality, mentorship, and continuous improvement. - Are curious about algorithmic trading and financial markets. - Are determined, ambitious yet humble, willing to lead by example. - Thrive in a meritocratic environment where impact matters more than titles. - Prefer ownership over process — you’d rather build the right thing than follow a playbook. - Enjoy working in-person with your team (not fully remote). ### Tip for a successful application: - Only apply if you are genuinely excited about leading a technical team in a fast-paced trading environment; this is not a people-management-only role — you will be deeply technical. - Write us a short, honest, and direct message about why you want to lead engineering at Wintermute. Tell us about a hard architecture decision you made, what the tradeoffs were, and how it played out. Do not send generic applications — we are looking for authentic technical leaders who share our values and ambitions. - We will arrange a UK visa sponsorship and help with relocation to London.