Senior Scala Backend Engineer – Real-Time Eval Services

NinjaTrader Clearing, LLC; Chicago, Northern (IL, KY); Hybrid; USD 125,000 - 175,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k with company match

Generous PTO

Paid holidays

Life and disability insurance

Job summary

NinjaTrader is seeking a Sr. Software Engineer I, Evaluation Services (Scala) to join our Chicago-based team with remote flexibility. You will design, build, and maintain Scala-based backends powering auto-liquidation, risk evaluation, and trading services.

Responsibilities include end-to-end ownership of features, building high-throughput actor-based systems, and collaborating across Trading Services, Solutions Engineering, and Product to deliver production-ready solutions.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production backend systems with real-time data and high availability.
• Strong, hands-on Scala expertise in idiomatic patterns and testing.
• Experience with actor-based concurrency models (Akka, Pekko).
• Relational DB skills with PostgreSQL and JSONB considerations.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and message buses (Kafka).
• Ability to write clear specs, scope work realistically, and set risk flags.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement Scala backend services for evaluation, risk, and trading workloads.
• Build actor-based systems to handle high-throughput market data and events.
• Own features end-to-end from spec through production hand-off.
• Design data models and DB changes, contribute to master schema and SQL repos.
• Diagnose production issues by log analysis and tracing distributed flows.
• Uphold code quality, testing, documentation, and robust PR practices.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate requirements into stories.

Skills

Backend engineering

Scala expertise

Actor-based concurrency

PostgreSQL & JSONB

Event-driven architecture

Troubleshooting & debugging

Technical specs & scoping

Communication skills

Tools

Akka

Protobuf

gRPC

PostgreSQL

Kafka

Datadog / observability

Job description

NinjaTrader is seeking a Sr. Software Engineer I, Evaluation Services (Scala) to join our Chicago-based team with remote flexibility. You will design, build, and maintain Scala-based backends powering auto-liquidation, risk evaluation, and trading services.

Responsibilities include end-to-end ownership of features, building high-throughput actor-based systems, and collaborating across Trading Services, Solutions Engineering, and Product to deliver production-ready solutions.