Software Engineer — Chicago, IL

Early Career Software Engineer (C++)

Company: Proprietary Trading Firm

Location: Chicago, IL (Chicago Board of Trade)

Employment Type: Full-time

Experience Level: 0–2 years

Salary: $90,000-120,000 per year

Current or future visa sponsorship not available

Company Overview

We are partnering with a trading-focused technology firm headquartered at the Chicago Board of Trade. Technology sits at the core of everything they build, driving their high-performance trading systems, low-latency execution engines, and real-time data processing infrastructure.

Role Overview

They are seeking a driven, curious, and analytical Software Engineer to join their core technology team. In this role, you will design, optimize, and maintain critical backend components of their electronic trading platform across Linux and Windows environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain efficient, low-latency C++ components across algorithm development, data analysis pipelines, and execution engine infrastructure.

• Write clean, reliable, and high-performance code adhering to modern C++ standards.

• Debug, profile, and optimize existing systems across Linux and Windows multi-platform environments.

• Work closely with quantitative researchers and systems engineers to implement trading strategy improvements and infrastructure enhancements.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, or a closely related technical field.

• Deep knowledge of modern C++, memory management, standard template library (STL), templates, and concurrency.

• Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and computational complexity.

Environment: Hands-on experience developing within Linux and/or Windows environments

Preferred Qualifications

• 1–2 years of software engineering experience (exceptional new graduates will be considered).

• Familiarity with network protocols and low-latency systems (sockets, UDP, RDMA, multicast).

• Practical experience with multithreading, concurrent systems, and lock-free programming.

• Experience working with SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL).

• Prior exposure to quantitative, financial, or high-throughput scientific computing domains, or relevant open-source contributions.