Senior Backend Manager

The Opportunity

Mesirow Financial is an independent, employee-owned firm founded in 1937. As specialists in investment, risk management and advisory services, we are committed to helping our institutional, corporate and individual clients achieve their objectives. Our professionals are inspired by an entrepreneurial desire to develop tailored solutions designed to deliver measurable results.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will build, modernize and evolve the systems behind our Investment Management applications. You will pair strong engineering fundamentals with cloud-native architecture, modern AI-assisted development and DevOps practices to deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain key backend components of Investment Management applications.
• Drive application modernization initiatives, including refactoring legacy applications, reducing technical debt, and transitioning appropriate workloads toward cloud-native and managed Azure services to improve scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency.
• Promote modern software engineering practices, including automated testing, secure coding, CI/CD, observability, and proactive performance optimization, with accountability for application reliability and maintainability throughout the software lifecycle.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, product owners, and technology teams to translate business requirements into practical, scalable solutions that improve operational efficiency and support business growth.
• Lead architecture and design of system implementations using proven patterns and best practices, including microservice-based designs where appropriate.
• Implement and customize solutions and integrate third-party products and market data/trading platforms.
• Enhance and maintain existing applications across our technology stack, including .NET, T-SQL, and SSIS/SSRS.
• Use AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code) to accelerate design, implementation, testing, code review, refactoring and documentation, while owning the quality and security of everything shipped.
• Build and improve release automation and infrastructure-as-code, and take part in releases and ongoing production support.
• Be a key contributor to innovation by building proofs of concept, including AI-enabled workflows, that can be leveraged across the enterprise.
• Diagnose and resolve complex issues, including designing and implementing workarounds when needed.
• Mentor and guide junior developers, who may not be direct reports, including on responsible and effective use of AI tooling.
• Create and execute project work plans, revising them as needs change.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience with C# and the Microsoft .NET stack (.NET Framework and modern .NET), Visual Studio or a related IDE.
• Strong experience building RESTful Web APIs and backend services.
• Azure: Hands-on experience designing, deploying and operating applications on Microsoft Azure (e.g., App Service, Functions, Azure SQL, Service Bus, Key Vault).
• Advanced SQL Server and T-SQL skills, including stored procedures and performance tuning.
• Experience with Entity Framework and/or a micro-ORM (e.g., Dapper).
• Solid object-oriented fundamentals; working knowledge of design and architecture patterns; ability to create well-designed, reusable components.
• Automated testing and CI/CD: Experience writing unit tests with mocking frameworks, and building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with automated build/test/deploy, source control and branching strategies (Git/Azure DevOps), and release management.
• Secure software development: Knowledge of secure coding standards and techniques for web applications and APIs, including secure handling of sensitive financial data.
• AI-assisted development: Hands-on experience using AI coding tools for software engineering (code generation, debugging, test creation, refactoring, code review, documentation), with sound judgment on when to trust, verify, or reject AI output, and awareness of secure use of AI tools.
• Working knowledge of distributed and microservice architecture concepts, including service boundaries, API design and asynchronous messaging.
• Experience developing in Agile/Scrum teams.
• Excellent analytical and math skills.
• Ability to work on multiple projects with minimal supervision and to meet tight deadlines.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions and explain complex information to technical and business audiences at all levels.
• Bachelor's or Associate degree in an IT discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with SSIS and SSRS.
• Hands-on experience with Claude Code specifically.
• Extensive experience designing, building and operating microservice-based systems at scale.
• Experience modernizing legacy .NET applications toward cloud-native and managed Azure services.
• Experience integrating with investment platforms and market data/trading systems such as Bloomberg, GTSS, DTCC, FX Connect, or ProtoColl, or a background in investment management or financial systems.
• Experience with Docker and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Bicep, ARM).
• Experience with monitoring, logging and observability tooling.
• Familiarity with building or integrating LLM-powered features, prompt design, or agent-based workflows.
• Familiarity with front-end frameworks (Angular, React) or Node.js sufficient to collaborate across the stack.
• Microsoft development certifications.
• Experience supporting legacy ColdFusion applications.

What You Bring

• Creativity and strong attention to detail.
• Exceptional customer service skills and professionalism with a diverse group of business users.
• A positive, productive team-player attitude.
• A genuine desire to keep learning, including as AI tooling and engineering practices evolve.

In accordance with the Illinois Pay Transparency Law, the anticipated hiring base salary for the role will be between $150,000 and $175,000 per year. However, base pay if hired will be determined on an individualized basis and is only part of the total compensation package, which, also provides the opportunity for a performance based bonus and the Mesirow benefit program.

EOE