What you'll do:

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to serve as the technical domain owner for the Transaction Ledger & Treasury system within our FCM platform, accountable for the financial correctness, reconciliation integrity, and system-of-record architecture of our brokerage systems. This role will lead the evolution of our architecture, modernizing and consolidating ledger, fund movement, and reconciliation logic into a coherent, cloud-native foundation. You will also drive the thoughtful use of AI-assisted development and operational tooling to increase engineering leverage, improve review quality, and accelerate modernization without compromising financial correctness or regulatory integrity. These are mission-critical systems where every state transition must be financially correct, auditable, and resilient under failure—because design flaws directly impact customer funds, regulatory standing, and firm capital.

As a Staff Engineer, your work will have a profound impact on our core FCM infrastructure, directly influencing our business’s bottom line. You will set the technical standard for the FCM engineering organization: defining architecture patterns, establishing engineering best practices, mentoring and elevating the engineers around you, and making high-stakes design decisions that determine whether our platform scales to meet the demands of a rapidly growing, globally distributed customer base. You will partner closely with engineering leadership, product management, compliance, and brokerage operations to ensure that every system you design is auditable, resilient, and built to serve both customers and regulators.

In this role you will:

• Define and own the foundational architecture of NinjaTrader’s cloud-native FCM platform on GCP/Kubernetes, including concurrency models, data consistency guarantees, service boundaries, and integration contracts across clearing, risk, and reporting systems
• Architect systems that process high-throughput trade flows with deterministic behavior under concurrency, partial failure, and asynchronous clearing acknowledgments across a 24/7 trading window
• Serve as the technical north star for the FCM engineering team by conducting deep, meaningful code reviews, pairing on complex problems, and leading architecture and design sessions that elevate the engineering bar
• Establish and enforce best practices across the FCM platform, including API design standards, testing strategies (unit, integration, contract, chaos), observability and SLI/SLO frameworks, CI/CD standards, and infrastructure-as-code patterns
• Define what excellence looks like for regulated financial systems and hold the team accountable to those standards
• Champion the responsible use of AI-assisted coding, testing, and code review workflows to increase velocity and reduce defects while preserving strict financial and audit constraints
• Design compliance-critical systems where regulatory requirements are treated as first-class architectural constraints, embedding audit trails, segregation controls, and compliance checkpoints directly into platform design
• Partner with engineering leadership, including the CTO and Director of Engineering, to shape broader technical strategy and govern system-of-record architecture, ledger data models, fund movement APIs, reconciliation workflows, and cross-service balance interactions
• Represent the FCM platform in cross-functional architecture forums and drive alignment across teams
• Take ownership of the most complex and high-impact technical challenges, transforming ambiguous problems into well-defined, executable plans

What you'll need:

• 8–12+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at the Staff level or equivalent scope of influence
• Deep expertise designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in cloud environments (GCP strongly preferred; AWS or Azure acceptable)
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, event-driven architectures, and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform
• Strong proficiency in modern backend languages such as Python, C++, Go, or similar, with the ability to make thoughtful technology decisions grounded in trade-offs
• Experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools, including code generation, static analysis, and automated test synthesis, to increase productivity and system quality in production environments
• Experience in financial services, capital markets, or brokerage technology, including trade lifecycle systems, clearing and settlement, and building systems where correctness and auditability are non-negotiable
• Proven track record as a technical authority and mentor who has raised the engineering bar of their teams
• Experience designing distributed systems where financial correctness, reconciliation, segregation of funds, and audit integrity are non-negotiable architectural constraints
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Demonstrated ownership of initiatives end-to-end, from problem framing and design through implementation, deployment, and operational maturity

Bonus Points for:

• Direct experience at a futures commission merchant (FCM), clearing firm, or broker-dealer operating under CFTC/NFA or SEC/FINRA regulatory frameworks
• Experience with CME clearing operations or self-clearing implementations
• Familiarity with treasury and money movement systems, including ACH, wire transfers, fund hold logic, and account segregation
• Track record of leading successful platform modernization or cloud migration programs in regulated financial environments
• Passion for futures, derivatives, and trading technologies and for democratizing access to these markets for retail traders

Compensation:

The salary range for this role will be $160,000.00 - $210,000.00 USD. In addition, this position will also receive an annual target bonus of 12%. Bonus pay at NinjaTrader is based on individual performance (50%) as well as company/team performance (50%).

Salary and bonus earnings are only two components of the total compensation package offered by NinjaTrader. NinjaTrader offers a 401K plan through ADP under which the company will match up to 3.5% of employee contributions. Annual paid time off allowance accrues at a rate of 23 days per year (some positions may qualify for more) plus seven paid holidays.

Location:

This role is based in Chicago, IL.* We follow a hybrid work schedule: In-office Tuesday through Thursday, with remote work on Mondays and Fridays. In addition to these weekly remote days, we offer:

• 20 additional flex remote days annually

• 5 Company Wide Office-Optional weeks tied to major holidays

*There may be remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois (outside the Chicago area), Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, Wisconsin.