District Partners is recruiting for an established, well-capitalized mortgage REIT and fixed income investor building the next generation of the technology behind its trading, analytics, and front-to-back investment operations. The firm runs lean and moves fast. This role exists now because leadership decided to grow the development team directly rather than add management layers, so you would join as a builder with a clear path to expanding ownership over time. The firm is investing seriously in modern architecture and AI-assisted development this year and wants engineers who are excited to grow with it, not just maintain what exists. If you know mortgage and fixed income markets and want to go deep where your work reaches production quickly and influences real investment decisions, this is built for that.

The client is a lean, well-capitalized mortgage REIT and fixed income investor operating in mortgage-backed securities within a regulated environment. Engineering sits directly alongside trading, portfolio management, finance, and operations, and the team is small enough that an individual contributor carries real influence and visibility up to senior technical leadership. This is a hands-on development role for someone who already understands the instruments and the trade lifecycle and wants depth in the business, not distance from it.

What You'll Be Owning:

• Production-grade software across the firm's internal investment and operational systems

• Backend services and business-facing applications supporting portfolio analytics, reporting, trading workflows, and operational processing

• The translation of real requirements from trading, finance, and operations into scalable technical solutions

• Engineering quality through thoughtful code review, automated testing, and strong development discipline

• Technical initiatives owned end to end, from design through deployment and ongoing support

• Practical use of modern AI-assisted development tools to improve productivity and delivery quality

• A point of view on technical debt and modernization, with a hand in prioritizing what gets fixed and when

The Environment:

This is a deliberately lean engineering team where business knowledge matters as much as the code. The firm first looked for a single broad senior hire and decided instead to invest in a developer who knows the domain and wants to grow into greater ownership. You would report directly to senior technical leadership and work shoulder to shoulder with the business. The role is an individual contributor to start, so you should want to build rather than manage on day one. The firm values people who have built a focused, stable track within finance and technology and who bring energy and start delivering quickly.

What You Bring to the Table:

This is a selective search and the client is prioritizing a focused group of high-caliber candidates.

• A stable, full-time career track with meaningful tenure and clear progression in each role, primarily within financial services

• Demonstrated experience building or supporting fixed income or mortgage technology, ideally involving mortgage-backed securities

• Familiarity with agency mortgage instruments, including pools, TBAs, and CMOs

• A working understanding of the investment trade lifecycle, including trade capture, clearing, settlement, pricing, and accounting

• Strong backend development in a JVM environment, primarily Java or Groovy

• Hands-on experience building applications backed by MongoDB or a similar document-oriented database

• Experience developing and deploying containerized applications in AWS

• Practical, responsible use of AI-assisted development tools

• A track record of owning solutions independently from concept through production deployment

• Clear communication of technical concepts and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders

Also valued:

• Experience within a mortgage REIT, broker-dealer, asset manager, or other buy-side fixed income environment

• Understanding of repo financing structures, including bilateral, tri-party, and reverse repo

• Exposure to institutional fixed income clearing and settlement workflows

• Familiarity with institutional fixed income trading, order management, or analytics platforms

• Experience with LLM-powered application patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation, model context protocols, or structured extraction

• Experience building internal business applications, financial analytics platforms, or reporting systems

• Familiarity with frontend development using React and TypeScript

Compensation (base plus bonus and equity): total compensation potential of approximately $240,000 to $280,000

• Base salary in the range of $190,000 to $235,000

• Annual performance bonus plus equity participation

Engagement: full-time, direct hire, individual contributor with a path to greater ownership

Location: Washington, DC or New York metro

Work model: hybrid, on site a few times a month and as needed, remote otherwise. The on-site cadence may become more regular over time, though that is not a current requirement

What stands out: deep domain work that reaches production fast, real investment in modern architecture and AI tooling, strong quality of life, and clear room to grow as the team expands