Software Developer (Research)

DRW Holdings, LLC.; Montreal (administrative region); On-site; CAD 110,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Mentorship

Postgraduate degrees

Volunteer hours

Wellness program

Catered meals

Job summary

DRW Montreal is seeking a software engineer to join the intersection of research and production systems. You will build real-time, data-intensive services and craft agentic tooling around LLMs to operate in a low-latency trading environment.

The role emphasizes rapid prototyping, production deployments, and ownership from edge to store, with opportunities to mentor, lead green-field initiatives, and contribute to a high-performance tech culture.

Qualifications

• 3-5 years building real-time or data-intensive systems.
• Depth with LLMs—how models behave, tool use, and bounding hallucination.
• Strong fundamentals in Python, Go, or Rust; deep systems experience in another language if needed.

Responsibilities

• Expand event-driven strategies across feeds and telemetry; perform rapid analyses in Python/Jupyter and implement system improvements.
• Build and operate agentic harnesses for data and infrastructure with quality in production.
• Own full-stack performance from network edge to in-memory stores; lead green-field initiatives and post-mortems.

Skills

Real-time systems

LLMs knowledge

Python

Go

Rust

Network programming

POC to production

Education

Computer Science / Data Science / Mathematics degree

Job description

DRW is a diversified trading firm with over 3 decades of experience bringing sophisticated technology and exceptional people together to operate in markets around the world. We value autonomy and the ability to quickly pivot to capture opportunities, so we operate using our own capital and trading at our own risk.

Headquartered in Chicago with offices throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, we trade a variety of asset classes including Fixed Income, ETFs, Equities, FX, Commodities and Energy across all major global markets. We have also leveraged our expertise and technology to expand into three non-traditional strategies: real estate, venture capital and cryptoassets.

We operate with respect, curiosity and open minds. The people who thrive here share our belief that it’s not just what we do that matters–it's how we do it. DRW is a place of high expectations, integrity, innovation and a willingness to challenge consensus.

We build the systems that turn real-world events into actionable signal, at low latencyand high reliability in a trading environment where being right second is the same asbeing wrong. This role sits at the intersection of research and infrastructure: you'llform hypotheses, prove them with rapid analysis, and then build the production systemsthat act on them.

We also build with LLMs as a first-class part of the toolchain, not a side experiment.The people who do well here are the ones who can wield an agentic harness as fluently as
they wield a profiler and who know exactly where each one stops being trustworthy.

How You Will Make an Impact

Discovery & Research

• Expand our event-driven strategy across exchange feeds, market news, social media, and infrastructure telemetry.
• Spin up rapid analyses in Python/Jupyter to assess signal quality, and turn what you find into system improvements.

LLM & Agentic Systems

• Build and operate agentic harnesses — tools, context management, evals, guardrails — that do real work against our data and infrastructure, and own their quality in production.
• Apply LLMs where they genuinely win (extraction, classification, triage, research acceleration) and make the call to not use one where they don't.

Infrastructure & Technical Leadership

• Own full-stack performance from the network edge to in-memory stores — instrumenting, monitoring, and debugging production systems alongside operations, keeping SLOs razor-sharp.
• Lead green-field initiatives, design reviews, and post-mortems.

What You Bring

Core

• 3-5 yearsbuilding real-time or data-intensive systems (we weigh trajectory and depth over the exact number).
• Depth with LLMs, not just usage— how these models actually behave (context and its failure modes, tool use, structured output, cost/latency trade-offs, bounding hallucination) and how to build the harness around one: tools, memory, retries, evals, human-in-the-loop boundaries. Bring something real you shipped and can walk us through end to end, including what broke.
• Strong engineering fundamentals in Python, Go, or Rust.A preference, not a gate — deep systems experience in another serious language transfers.
• Deep knowledge of network programming and protocols— TCP/UDP/IP, DNS, BGP, HTTP(S), WebSocket, QUIC.
• Rapid POCs to production— validate statistical significance, iterate quickly, ship, and explain the result to technical and non-technical audiences alike.
• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Data Science, Mathematics, or a related discipline.

Who Thrives Here

This is a competitive, high-stakes environment, and we're looking for people who want that
rather than tolerate it. You'll likely recognize yourself here if:

• You want problems that are genuinely hard and measurable — where the scoreboard is real and public inside the team.
• You move fast without being sloppy, and you'd rather ship, measure, and correct than deliberate indefinitely.
• You're comfortable being wrong quickly and in public, and you update rather than defend.

Bonus Points

• Depth in the current LLM ecosystem — agent frameworks, MCP, RAG architectures, eval tooling, or local/self-hosted inference.
• Demonstrated success squeezing latency from NGINX, Envoy, or custom load-balancing layers.
• Background in high-pressure domains — trading floors, esports, competitive athletics, or hackathons.
• Open-source contributions, technical blogging, or conference speaking.

What DRW Montreal has to offer you:

• Mentorship with experienced software developers, database administrators, and technical project managers
• Continuous learning through paid postgraduate degrees, Dev Lightning talks, online learning support and 1 on 1 language tutoring with Berlitz
• 40 hours of paid volunteer work at the organization of your choice
• Bi-weekly social activities, monthly wellness plan, on-site weekly massages, and games room
• Enjoy daily catered meals (breakfast and lunch) with unlimited snacks and beverages

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