Senior Software Engineer, Prime

About the team + role

We are building an elite team, applying frontier technologies to the world’s biggest financial problems. 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. 

The Prime team's 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.

As a Senior Software Engineer, 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.

This role is based in our London office, with in-person attendance expected at least 3 days per week. 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. Requires participation in an on-call rotation to support business needs.

What you’ll do

• 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.

• 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.

• Shape the team's technical roadmap and architecture, advocating for the reliability, correctness, and risk-control work that keeps client money safe.

• 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.

What you bring

• 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.

• Hands-on experience building financial systems — user balances, ledgers, risk engines, settlement, or payments — where correctness is non-negotiable and mistakes are expensive.

• Deep expertise in distributed state across boundaries, transactional integrity, idempotency, and exactly-once semantics.

• Strong design judgment: you enumerate the failure paths, name your invariants, and can point at the constraint, test, or alert that enforces each one.

• 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.

What we offer

• Challenging, high-impact work to grow your career

• Performance driven compensation with multipliers for outsized impact, bonus programs, and equity ownership

• Top tier benefits to fuel your work, including supplemental health insurance, ancillary insurance, and mental health support programs

• Access to the best AI tools on the market and continuous AI skill-building for every employee, technical or not

• Lifestyle wallet - a highly flexible employer-paid benefits spending account expenses beyond traditional benefits such as wellness, childcare, learning, and more.

• Time off to recharge including company holidays, paid time off, sick time, paid volunteer time off, parental leave, and more!

• Exceptional office experience with catered meals, events, and comfortable workspaces.

• Monthly commuter stipend to help offset in-office commuting costs