Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Frequency Platform - UP Reference Data Team

Drweng; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 175,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, pharmacy, dental and vision insurance

401k with employer match

Flexible spending accounts

Annual discretionary bonus

Job summary

DRW is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Reference Data team in Chicago. You will work closely with analysts and traders to develop systems for high-frequency trading.

This role offers a salary range of $175,000 to $225,000 depending on experience. The position is hybrid, allowing for flexibility between home and office work.

DRW provides comprehensive employee benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of platform-level software development experience.
• Strong computer science fundamentals and a degree in Computer Science.
• Financial market and reference data familiarity.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve data and platform capabilities for trading workflows.
• Develop software for data acquisition and visualization.
• Design scalable pipelines and platforms using big data patterns.

Skills

Platform-level software development

Computer science fundamentals

Financial market familiarity

Big data technologies

SQL and data warehousing

Cloud-native deployments

Observability tools

Education

Degree in Computer Science or equivalent work experience

Tools

Spark

Delta Lake

Kafka

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Splunk

Prometheus

Grafana

Sentry

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 are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Reference Data team in the Unified Platform (UP) organization as part of our efforts to build a mid-frequency platform. UP consolidates data and technologies into a comprehensive solution, accelerating time to market. Optimizing decision‑making and research, our platform simplifies implementing new ideas, enhancing our competitive edge.

As a Senior Software Engineer on one of the Unified Platform teams, you'll be part of a tight knit team of software engineers working closely with internal users (analysts, quants, traders) to develop innovative systems that enable research and trading. You'll experiment with emerging technologies to process data at scale. You’ll wrestle a mountain of data into human understandable insights.

We care deeply about preserving a respectful and diverse team culture. We are a group of polyglots and technologists always seeking to find the right tool for each problem, even if that means learning something new or reviving something old. We value business impact and outcomes over process, and we make decisions based on data. We strive to adapt quickly as business priorities change.

What you’ll do in this role:

• Build and evolve data and platform capabilities that support mid-frequency trading research workflows
• Partner closely with internal customers to understand their needs and build intuitive self‑service tools
• Develop software for large scale data acquisition, storage, accessibility, and visualization
• Design and operate scalable pipelines and platforms using modern "big data" and lakehouse patterns
• Improve reliability, observability, performance, and ergonomics across platform services
• Learn about market microstructure, financial instruments, and markets in which DRW participates or wants to participate in

What could be a good fit if you:

• Are motivated to solve hard problems with deceptively simple solutions
• Think a lot about user experience and try to really understand end users’ jobs and pain points
• Think a lot about APIs, modular design and testing
• Love refactoring and keep trying until you find a better answer
• Enjoy making the “right way to do it” the path of least resistance
• Have made a random tool for yourself…then peers ask for it…then other teams ask for it
• Are fiercely proud of your project’s reliability, performance and ease of maintenance

What we need on the team:

• 5+ years of platform‑level software development experience
• Strong computer science fundamentals; a degree in Computer Science or equivalent work experience
• Financial market & reference data familiarity — understanding instrument IDs, feed normalization etc.
• Experience building research platforms and/or supporting mid‑frequency trading environments
• Comfort working within a globally‑distributed team
• A background in some of the following a bonus:
  • Big data technologies: Spark, Delta Lake, Iceberg, Kafka, Airflow and/or Argo Workflows
  • SQL and data warehousing/lake querying patterns
  • Cloud‑native deployments: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes
  • Observability: Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry

Location:

This position is hybrid and can sit in Chicago, London, or New York City.

The annual base salary range for this position is $175,000 to $225,000 depending on the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and relevant skill set. The position is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. In addition, DRW offers a comprehensive suite of employee benefits including group medical, pharmacy, dental and vision insurance, 401k (with discretionary employer match), short and long‑term disability, life and AD&D insurance, health savings accounts, and flexible spending accounts.

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California residents, please review the California Privacy Notice for information about certain legal rights at https://drw.com/california-privacy-notice.

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