C++ Trading Systems Engineer

Headlands Technologies LLC; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Headlands Technologies LLC in Chicago seeks a C++ Software Developer for a new graduate position to design and implement high-performance trading software. You will collaborate with research, systems, and operations teams to architect, test, and optimize automated electronic trading algorithms.

The role emphasizes scalable infrastructure, distributed storage, and latency-sensitive design across the technical stack, with opportunities to contribute to exchange connectivity and performance

Qualifications

• Preferred degree in any computing related area; in lieu of this, extensive professional software development experience
• Fundamentals of software engineering
• Genuine interest in solving technical problems with strong implementation ability
• Low ego; able to work both in a team and autonomously
• Committed to automated, scalable, maintainable solutions with extensive testing
• Strong ability to write C++ or other statically-typed imperative languages
• Comfortable operating across levels of abstraction from machines to distributed systems
• Strong knowledge of computing details across the tech stack
• Knowledge of Linux is a plus
• Experience in trading industry preferred but not mandatory

Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and improve exchange connectivity
• Extend functionality of existing infrastructure
• Understand exchange behavior and integrate into the trading system
• Maintain and extend core research infrastructure
• Design and maintain distributed storage systems with reliability needs
• Address performance limitations in software, libraries, and Linux
• Investigate new technologies to improve stability, scalability, and performance
• Implement new trading strategies with research and operations teams
• Extend strategy framework for new behaviors and improvements
• Investigate signal issues for the trading system
• Compare strategy performance in simulation vs production
• Collaborate with operations, systems, and research teams on production issues
• Optimize live trading system performance
• Measure latency and throughput with microbenchmarks, profiling, tracing
• Develop new algorithms to address performance bottlenecks
• Rearchitect trading system components to remove bottlenecks
• Fundamental network programming and low-level protocols
• Investigate network captures to understand latency and behavior
• Ensure stability and reliability of the trading system
• Build monitoring for trading strategies and infrastructure
• Conduct code reviews with teammates

Skills

C++ programming

Software engineering fundamentals

Distributed systems

Problem solving

Team collaboration

Testing automation

C++ cross-platform

High performance

Networking concepts

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computing related area

Experience in lieu of degree

Tools

Git

Linux

GDB

Valgrind

Job description

Headlands Technologies LLC in Chicago seeks a C++ Software Developer for a new graduate position to design and implement high-performance trading software. You will collaborate with research, systems, and operations teams to architect, test, and optimize automated electronic trading algorithms.

The role emphasizes scalable infrastructure, distributed storage, and latency-sensitive design across the technical stack, with opportunities to contribute to exchange connectivity and performance