Site Reliability Engineer - Algorithmic Trading

DRW; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 130,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Group medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) with employer match

Short-term and long-term disability

Life and AD&D insurance

Health savings accounts

Flexible spending accounts

Job summary

DRW, located in Chicago, is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to join their Algorithmic Trading Team. This role is crucial for ensuring the robustness of production trading systems and involves collaborating with engineers and traders for 24/7 support. Candidates should have a Bachelor’s in computer science, 3-10+ years' experience in software development or SRE, and familiarity with observability tools and scripting languages like Bash or Python. The position offers a competitive salary range from $130,000 to $225,000 and various employee benefits.

Qualifications

• 3–10+ years of hands-on software development or SRE experience.
• Experience with logging, metrics, and tracing tools.
• Strong understanding of the Linux TCP/IP stack.

Responsibilities

• Provide 24/7 first-line support for trading and testing environments.
• Monitor and identify issues before they impact trading.
• Standardize CI/CD and operational processes across teams.

Skills

Software development

SRE experience

Observability tools

Scripting languages (Bash, Python, Ruby)

Network communications

Diagnostic capabilities

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent

Job description

Job Summary

Site Reliability Engineer – Algorithmic Trading Team (Chicago office)

The SRE team is critical to the success of our trading, ensuring that our production trading systems, test environment and research pipeline are working flawlessly.

We’re looking for a Site Reliability Engineer who thrives at the intersection of software, trading and infrastructure – someone who creates observability that surfaces issues before they ever cause a problem, owns the response when things go wrong, and relentlessly drives automation that eliminates friction and keeps our team focused on our goals.

What You Will Do

• Work with software engineers and traders to provide 24/7 first‑line support of our trading, testing, and research environment.
• Proactively monitor and identify issues before they impact trading; define and automate observability around application SLAs and build anomaly detectors that surface problems early.
• Oversee and maintain our test trading environment, keeping it running smoothly and pursuing automation of routine interventions required to maintain a stable test platform for development.
• Standardize CI/CD and operational processes across development teams to reduce friction and speed up delivery; improve deployment scripts and release verification processes.
• Perform stress tests and verify SLAs under load; work with application and DevOps engineers to design and improve support for this type of testing.
• Collaborate closely with traders, engineers, system administrators, data centers, networking, and other shared services.

What You Will Need

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent practical background.
• 3–10+ years of hands‑on software development or SRE experience.
• Demonstrated experience with observability tools – logging, metrics and tracing.
• Hands‑on development experience in scripting languages like Bash, Python, or Ruby.
• An automation‑first approach to problem solving – you understand that manual processes don’t scale and instinctively eliminate them before they become a bottleneck.
• Demonstrated knowledge of network communications, including a comprehensive understanding of the Linux TCP/IP stack, use of multicast networking, and network protocol interactions.
• Solid diagnostic capabilities from the application layer through the network and low‑level hardware.
• Experience with network capture and time synchronization.
• High level of ownership, accountability, reliability, and strong follow‑through.
• Positive AI mentality and experience with AI agents to accelerate SRE tasks.

Compensation & Benefits

The annual base salary range for this position is $130,000 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, this role offers a comprehensive suite of employee benefits, including group medical, pharmacy, dental and vision insurance, 401(k) (with discretionary employer match), short‑term and long‑term disability, life and AD&D insurance, health savings accounts, and flexible spending accounts.