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Staff Quantitative Developer

DriveWealth

Office - Chicago

  • $220,000–$240,000 per year
  • Full Time
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About the role

About the Role

We are seeking a Staff 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.

What You'll Do

  • 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

You Bring

  • 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)

Special Knowledge (Nice to Have, But Not Required)

  • 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


Location


This role is open to candidates in the following locations: Chicago, IL - Hybrid

  • This role is expected to come into the office on a cadence set by the Hiring Manager/Team.

  • If you're not based in the location listed above, this role is not a fit, and we cannot accommodate remote work.

  • Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. DriveWealth does not sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time.

Pay Range: $220,000 – $240,000 USD