Head of HFT Trading Technology

This role offers the opportunity to join a closely-knit, highly skilled Front Office Trading Technology group renowned for its expertise and professionalism.

We foster a collaborative environment that emphasizes face-to-face communication, enabling you to participate in the technical project initiation through to successful go-live, offering a strong sense of accomplishment.

This position provides unique exposure to decision-makers at some of the world’s largest HFT firms.

We are seeking an experienced Manager to lead our specialized High-Frequency Trading (HFT) systems team in Japan.

This team designs, develops, supports, and continuously optimizes ultra-low-latency trading systems that serve sophisticated HFT clients based outside Japan.

Our systems trade products listed on TSE, JNX, ODX, JAX, and OSE.

The team has built and maintains trading infrastructure that consistently delivers the lowest latency among brokers in the market - entirely developed in-house with no reliance on external vendors.

The team designs, implements and operates co-located trading infrastructure and exchange connectivity that must deliver reliable, deterministic performance at microsecond/nanosecond levels and process large volumes of real-time data.

You will oversee and work closely with FPGA/Verilog/C/LUAJit/Java application developers, network engineers, Linux sysadmins and trading desk stakeholders to deliver market-leading DMA co-lo solutions.

Ultra-Low Latency High-Frequency DMA is a key component of Nomura’s Electronic Trading franchise.

This development role is embedded within our Tokyo-based team delivering cutting edge DMA co-location solutions.

Lead and manage a high-performing engineering team responsible for the full lifecycle of HFT and ultra-low-latency trading systems (development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and production support).

Drive technical strategy and architecture for two tiers of systems:

Premium tier: FPGA-based solutions developed in Verilog.

Standard tier: Software systems written in C and LuaJIT.

Ensure continuous improvement of system performance, reliability, and latency competitiveness.

Participate in the day-to-day production support and incident management for critical trading systems.

Act as a primary technical point of contact for external HFT clients, managing technical communication, requirements gathering, issue resolution, and relationship management.

Collaborate closely with internal stakeholders (trading, risk, compliance, infrastructure) to align system capabilities with business and client needs.

Set technical standards, code quality practices, and operational excellence processes within the team.

Mentor and develop engineers, foster a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous learning.

Manage team priorities, capacity planning, and delivery timelines in a fast-paced, market-driven environment.

Ensure all systems and processes meet regulatory, security, and operational risk requirements applicable to a major Japanese securities firm.