Lead QA Engineer

Job Description

Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. provides an opportunity to work with advanced technology while addressing complex business and technical challenges in the financial sector.

The Lead Quality Assurance Engineer will play a key role in the testing and delivery of high-performance, low-latency Pillar Options trading applications. This position will support all stages of the Software Development Life Cycle, including requirements analysis, test planning, automation, functional and technical validation, release certification, production readiness, and post-production issue analysis.

The successful candidate will combine strong options-market knowledge with hands-on technical expertise, automation experience, and QA leadership. The individual must be comfortable working across multiple initiatives in a fast-paced environment and demonstrate sound judgment, strong problem-solving skills, clear communication, and a consistent commitment to quality and operational excellence.

Responsibilities

• Lead the QA strategy, planning, execution, and certification activities for Pillar Options trading-system enhancements and releases.
• Analyze business requirements, product specifications, technical designs, and code changes to determine appropriate test coverage and identify potential risks.
• Validate trading workflows across order entry, matching, auctions, market data, reference data, risk controls, and system recovery.
• Analyze data from QA and production environments to identify behavioral differences, investigate defects, and develop additional test scenarios and diagnostic tools.
• Lead defect triage and root-cause analysis by reviewing application logs, protocol messages, market data, system events, and test evidence.
• Differentiate critical business-impacting incidents from lower-severity issues and ensure that concerns are resolved or escalated appropriately.
• Support production releases, implementation validations, UAT activities, operational readiness exercises, audits, and post-release verification.

Knowledge and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field.
• 6+ years of experience in software quality assurance, including testing low-latency client-server applications.
• Experience testing financial markets, exchange, brokerage, order-management, or electronic-trading applications.
• Knowledge of order types, market structures, price-time priority, auctions, market data, and risk controls.
• Strong hands-on experience with Linux or Unix environments; experience with Red Hat Linux is preferred.
• Knowledge of the FIX protocol and experience validating FIX-based order-entry workflows.
• Strong understanding of software testing methodologies, test design techniques, defect management, risk-based testing, and release certification.
• Ability to work in a highly demanding and fast-paced environment.
• Demonstrated ability to lead testing activities, provide technical direction, and support the development of other QA engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in options trading systems is a plus. 
• Working knowledge of C++ and the ability to review application code or technical changes for testing impact.
• Familiarity with binary order-entry or market-data protocols.
• Experience with supporting production changes, UAT testing and debugging prod issues.
• Experience with performance, capacity, resiliency, failover, and recovery testing.
• Results Driven: Drive, focus and commitment to deliver results that meet the requirements of internal customers along with the passion for quality and getting the right results in the right way. Ability to work tight schedules/deadlines and multitask.
• Teamwork: Internal communication is always a team effort. It is important to have the ability to interact positively and confidently with others and have resilience, determination and focus to succeed in shared objectives
• Operational Excellence: A passion for quality and a practical focus on getting the right results in the right way. Ensuring that decisions are fully implemented. The ability to anticipate and plan for significant changes in the organization, markets and customer requirements. Understand the need for change and help others to see the benefits by overcoming barriers

New York Base Salary Range 

The expected base salary for this role, if located in New York, is between $120,000 - 175,000 USD.  The base salary range does not include Intercontinental Exchange’s incentive compensation.  While we provide this range as general guidance, at ICE we compensate employees based on the skillset and experience of the individual. Regular full-time ICE employees are eligible for a suite of competitive employee benefits, including healthcare coverage (medical, dental and vision), a 401(k) plan, life insurance, time off, and paid leave for qualifying circumstances. 

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