Senior Quantitative Developer

DriveWealth•Chicago, IL

2d•$220,000 - $240,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior Quantitative Developer to join the team building a core, ultra-low-latency trading system. You will work on the pricing and order-handling logic that drives trading economics at scale. This is a hands-on engineering role embedded within a high-performance, deterministic trading system, working closely with traders, risk, and quant researchers to translate trading logic into production-grade, low-latency code.

Requirements

6+ years of professional software development experience, including significant time in a senior or lead capacity
Strong background in quantitative or financial domains—pricing models, market microstructure, order matching, or trading systems
Proven experience building and maintaining low-latency, high-throughput production systems
Deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and performance optimization in a JVM-based language
Experience designing for determinism and reproducibility in systems where correctness and auditability are critical
Solid grounding in numerical precision and decimal/fixed-point arithmetic, particularly relevant to financial calculations
Proficiency in quantitative data analysis using data frames or similar tabular tooling (e.g., pandas, Polars, R) for exploring, validating, and back-testing trading logic against historical data
Strong testing discipline, including behavior-driven or scenario-based testing approaches for complex business logic
Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to work directly with traders, risk managers, and quant researchers to clarify requirements
Experience with distributed systems concepts—consensus/clustering, state replication, and failover
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Finance, or a related quantitative field (or equivalent practical experience)

Nice To Haves

Direct experience working on or adjacent to a broker-dealer, exchange, ATS, or other regulated trading venue
Familiarity with market data feeds, quote handling, and reference pricing sources
Exposure to FIX protocol or other trading-industry messaging protocols
Experience with event-sourced or snapshot-based state persistence and schema/data migration strategies
Background in capital markets regulatory concepts (best execution, trade reporting, price improvement obligations)
Experience with streaming/event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka) in a trading or financial context
Familiarity with container/deployment tooling in regulated, latency-sensitive production environments
Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in a quantitative discipline
Prior experience with proprietary or in-house trading platforms/frameworks
Contributions to open-source performance-critical or financial-systems projects

Responsibilities

Design and implement pricing and order-handling logic within a low-latency, deterministic trading engine
Work on order-lifecycle mechanics specific to trading economics
Partner with quant researchers and trading desks to translate models and trading strategies into deterministic, testable production code
Optimize critical-path logic to meet strict end-to-end latency targets
Participate in system design discussions around state persistence and failover/recovery for a clustered, stateful engine
Write comprehensive automated tests (unit and behavior-driven) to validate correctness of pricing and trading logic under a wide range of market scenarios
Participate in code review, on-call rotation, and incident response for a production trading system
Contribute to capacity planning and performance tuning as trading volumes grow