Strategic Program Manager - Trading Ops & Growth

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

Benefits offered by this job

Generous time off

Insurance coverage

Paid parental leave

Free breakfast and lunch

Job summary

Chicago Trading Company (CTC) is a premier proprietary trading firm focusing on options market making. The role supports senior leadership in scaling systematic trading, accelerating strategic initiatives, and enhancing risk management while collaborating with researchers, traders, and technologists.

The position emphasizes roadmap development, cross-team coordination, and process improvements to optimize execution costs and data workflows in a hybrid work environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor or Master’s degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (preferred).
• Experience in systematic trading, quantitative / technical program management, or consulting in options/volatility strategies—or similarly complex environments.
• Understanding of options risk (Greeks, volatility surfaces), internalization/externalization trade flows, and delta hedging fundamentals.
• Proven track record in program and process management across engineering and trading, with expertise in OKRs, dependency mapping, and post-incident analysis.
• Exceptional communication skills—capable of producing clear, concise reporting, making decisive recommendations, and driving swift execution.
• Adaptive problem solver with a growth mindset—able to learn from setbacks, pivot quickly, and champion continuous improvement.

Responsibilities

• Assist in building roadmaps, reviewing interdependencies, and help with sequencing.
• Help team members break projects down into smaller, incremental commercial steps. Track progress and drive accountability.
• Anticipate breaks in project plans, elevate and adjust plans as projects pivot.
• Improve team communication by getting right stakeholders in the room, re-centering focus by summarizing current state, shepherding projects to sensible next steps and defining what good follow-ups looks like.
• Develop solid understanding of data processes and infrastructure. Understand current and future downstream data use cases. Drive data requirements as they relate to model research use cases.
• Help business leads drive high degree of consistency between research and production.
• Drive cross-team collaboration with other businesses and departments.
• Assist in supporting technical upgrades to management tooling.
• Optimize workflows: map end-to-end processes, identify bottlenecks, and recommend enhancements or new tools to enable continuous improvement.
• Foster a high-performance culture: create a collaborative culture committed to problem solving, high quality delivery, and ongoing refinement of processes.

Skills

Program management

Cross-functional collaboration

Clear communication

Growth mindset

Adaptive problem solving

Education

Bachelor or Master’s degree in Business, CS, Engineering, or related field

Tools

OKRs

Dependency mapping

Job description

Chicago Trading Company (CTC) is a premier proprietary trading firm focusing on options market making. The role supports senior leadership in scaling systematic trading, accelerating strategic initiatives, and enhancing risk management while collaborating with researchers, traders, and technologists.

The position emphasizes roadmap development, cross-team coordination, and process improvements to optimize execution costs and data workflows in a hybrid work environment.