Senior Scala Backend Engineer: Real-Time Trading

NinjaTrader; United States; On-site; USD 96,000 - 192,000; Full time

Job summary

NinjaTrader is seeking a Sr. Software Engineer for its Evaluation Services team. You will design, build, and maintain the Scala-based backend systems behind our auto-liquidation engine, risk evaluation, and trading services.

You will own complex backend problems end-to-end and work with multiple teams to deliver production-ready features in a fast-paced environment. You will also mentor junior engineers, shape data models, and contribute to architectural decisions as we modernize legacy Scala

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience with real-time data, concurrency, and high availability.
• Strong, hands-on Scala expertise in a large existing codebase.
• Experience with actor-based concurrency models (Akka, Pekko, or equivalent).
• Relational DB skills with PostgreSQL; JSONB vs normalized structures.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and message buses (Kafka, Pub/Sub).

Responsibilities

• Design and implement Scala backend services for evaluation, risk, and trading workloads.
• Build and evolve actor-based systems handling high-throughput market data and events.
• Own features end-to-end from specs to production hand-off.
• Design data models and DB changes (PostgreSQL, JSONB).
• Diagnose complex backend issues and incidents under load.
• Drive code quality through PR reviews and testing discipline.
• Collaborate with teams to translate requirements into well-scoped stories.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and tech debt remediation.
• Mentor junior engineers on Scala idioms and testing practices.

Skills

Scala

Akka/Pekko

PostgreSQL

Kafka

Distributed systems

Code reviews

Tech specs

Communication

Mentoring

Tools

Protobuf

gRPC

SQL tooling

Datadog

Observability tooling

Job description

NinjaTrader is seeking a Sr. Software Engineer for its Evaluation Services team. You will design, build, and maintain the Scala-based backend systems behind our auto-liquidation engine, risk evaluation, and trading services.

You will own complex backend problems end-to-end and work with multiple teams to deliver production-ready features in a fast-paced environment. You will also mentor junior engineers, shape data models, and contribute to architectural decisions as we modernize legacy Scala