Software Engineer - Research Technology

About the role

DRW, a diversified trading firm headquartered in Chicago, is hiring a Software Engineer for its Research Technology team. You will join a small team building the software platform that powers researchers running compute-heavy analyses on very large event-stream datasets. The workload is comparable to a game engine's replay and simulation loop, a telco's real-time packet pipeline, or a bigtech streaming and analytics platform, applied to financial market data. Domain expertise in trading and market microstructure is welcome but not required on day one.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain high-performance, scalable software and data systems used by quant researchers and trading teams.
• Implement raw exchange data pipelines in modern C++ and run them at high-throughput scale.
• Orchestrate and improve the reliability of data and compute pipelines on HPC clusters.
• Create ad-hoc computation frameworks and research tooling in Python with C++ integrations, letting researchers slice, backtest and iterate quickly.
• Develop and maintain simulation frameworks integrated with HFT/live trading platforms, and support training and deployment of quantitative models.
• Monitor, manage and troubleshoot distributed platforms, and optimize codebases for performance, reliability and resource efficiency.

Required profile

• 2+ years of professional experience building large-scale, high-performance systems.
• Strong CS fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, networking, OS, concurrency and system design.
• Data engineering fluency: designing schemas, choosing storage formats, understanding compression and I/O trade-offs, and operating pipelines that write and read hundreds of TB, including columnar formats such as Parquet or Arrow.
• Experience designing and operating services or platforms used by other technical users in data-intensive environments.
• Ability to ship production software safely and repeatedly, with excellent communication and a collaborative mindset.

Required skills

• Daily use of modern C++ (C++17 or later) and Python.
• HPC orchestration (Slurm today, evolving).
• Desirable: Rust, GPU programming, ML/deep learning frameworks, and experience with job schedulers such as Slurm, Kubernetes, Ray or Spark.