Senior Production Engineer

About Us: Optimal Market Technologies is a FINRA-registered broker-dealer with an innovative platform of wholesale options and execution solutions designed to meet the needs of today’s dynamic market participants. Optimal can quickly and seamlessly enhance its platform, adapt to regulatory changes, and offer a more efficient implementation that scales as clients grow. Optimal is disrupting the US Options Wholesale landscape by introducing a Competition for Order Flow model through which market makers compete for retail flow on our platform based on best execution quality. Additional offerings include an Institutional Alternative Trading System (ATS) for discreet execution and price improvement and Execution Services for institutional-grade routing and algorithmic execution designed to balance price capture, speed, and market impact across trading objectives. This is an opportunity to work for a fintech start-up and to be an integral part of growing a broker-dealer from the ground up. As a small, hardworking team, we pride ourselves on our entrepreneurial culture and cross-team collaboration. We recently raised funding from several strategic partners and are in a very exciting stage of growth. Position: Senior Production Engineer Company: Optimal Market Technologies, LLC Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid) Salary: $150,000 - $225,000 base salary + discretionary bonus (commensurate with experience) Position Overview: We are seeking a Senior Production Engineer to own the support, investigation and configuration function for our high-performance options trading platform. The role is deliberately broad: it runs from major improvements to platform reliability and automation, through investigations and configuration, down to the reactive day-to-day tasks that keep clients trading. You will own all of it, build the user-facing tools, reports and dashboards that make the platform easier to run, and use automation to steadily shrink the reactive workload for the whole team. Primary Responsibilities: Support and investigation: Own the support and escalation path for the trading platform, with same-day acknowledgment and a named owner on every issue. Provide daily support coverage from 7:30am Eastern through market close and end-of-day processing. Investigate production issues through to root cause, across our technology stack. Work directly with clients, PMMs, exchanges, and brokers to troubleshoot and answer technical questions. Configuration: Own platform configuration: client onboarding setup, FIX sessions, environments, and reference data. Make configuration changes safe, repeatable, and documented. Build and automate: Build user-facing features such as GUIs, reports, and dashboards that support trading, operations, and clients. Turn recurring investigations into automation, self-service tools, and runbooks; a shrinking reactive workload is a core measure of success in this role. Improve the team's tooling, scripts, and operational workflows as you go. AI and productivity: Use AI-assisted development and investigation tools fluently, ideally Claude Code. Advance how the team applies AI to support, investigation, and configuration work. What We're Looking For: Hands-on experience in financial trading systems, including Order Management Systems and the FIX Protocol. 3+ years of professional experience in a production engineering or software engineering role, including time spent writing production code or automation. Strong practical Python; able to read and debug C++. Deep experience supporting Linux-based applications: logs, tracing, debugging, performance analysis. SQL, ideally PostgreSQL. Fluent, demonstrated use of AI-assisted tools in real production or development workflows. Strong communication and interpersonal skills; comfortable working directly with clients and counterparties. A bias toward fixing the cause, not just the symptom, and automating so the same issue doesn't come back. Why This Role: You will own a function, not a queue. Support, investigation and configuration at Optimal is a first-class engineering role: you will have the mandate and the tools to automate away recurring work, build the dashboards and reports our traders and clients rely on, and directly shape how a growing broker-dealer runs its platform. Optimal is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.