Senior Software Engineer, Finance (Clojure/Python)

Senior Software Engineer, Finance (Clojure/Python)

Chicago

Company Overview

DRW is a diversified trading firm with over 3 decades of experience bringing sophisticated technology and exceptional people together to operate in markets around the world. We value autonomy and the ability to quickly pivot to capture opportunities, so we operate using our own capital and trading at our own risk.

Headquartered in Chicago with offices throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, we trade a variety of asset classes including Fixed Income, ETFs, Equities, FX, Commodities and Energy across all major global markets.

We operate with respect, curiosity and open minds. The people who thrive here share our belief that it’s not just what we do that matters—it's how we do it.

Position Summary

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Unified Platform (UP) team. The UP‑Finance team builds and operates the systems that underpin DRW's financial accounting, regulatory reporting, reconciliation, and cost basis infrastructure.

What You'll Work On

• Our systems span the full lifecycle from PnL calculation, general ledger classification, financial reporting and regulatory capital reporting. You’ll work across initiatives such as:
  • Delivering on major regulatory, ERP, and financial reporting initiatives
  • Migrating infrastructure to Kubernetes and modernizing our deployment practices
  • Modernizing observability and monitoring across the finance platform
• You’ll spend time upfront with accountants, financial analysts, and operations teams to deeply understand business problems, help stakeholders articulate requirements and test assumptions, and then turn that into an architecture and a plan. You’ll drive your project forward day‑to‑day, breaking big business requirements into shippable increments and delivering iteratively.
• You’ll also spend time reviewing code, providing feedback on design documents, unblocking teammates, and participating in a support rotation.

You’ll be right at home if

• You break large, ambiguous problems into small increments and ship continuously.
• You care deeply about the business domain you work in and want to understand why the numbers matter.
• You’re comfortable leading a project end‑to‑end: discovery, architecture, stories, implementation, deployment and support.
• You have strong opinions, loosely held; you challenge ideas constructively and welcome the same in return.
• You focus on reducing operational burden and prefer to automate problems away.
• You communicate complex technical topics clearly to engineers and business partners, and drive productive debates to resolution.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of professional software development experience
• Strength in at least one of Clojure or Python. Experience with Ruby and PL/SQL is also valuable.
• Experience in the finance or accounting domain, working with PnL, reconciliation, general ledger, regulatory reporting, or cost basis.
• Strong system design skills; able to reason about architectural tradeoffs, distributed systems, reliability and operability.
• Solid understanding of relational databases: transactionality, indexing, performance tuning, and data modeling.
• Experience building and operating production systems with modern infrastructure (containers, CI/CD pipelines, orchestration).
• A track record of mentoring engineers and contributing to engineering culture, with ambition to grow technical leadership.
• Deep Python expertise—data pipelines, scheduling, tooling.
• Experience with Clojure or other Lisp-family languages.
• Hands‑on experience with observability tooling—structured logging, metrics, alerting, anomaly detection.
• Familiarity with Oracle, Kafka, or Airflow.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and infrastructure‑as‑code.
• Background in reducing operational toil through automation and better system design.

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. DRW offers a comprehensive suite of employee benefits including group medical, pharmacy, dental and vision insurance, 401(k) with discretionary employer match, short and long‑term disability, life and AD&D insurance, health savings accounts, and flexible spending accounts.

Equal Employment Opportunity

As set forth in DRW’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.