Senior Production Software Engineer - Trading Systems
Job Description
[Up to c. $200k Base Salary + Discretionary Bonus | Office-Led Working]
Role Overview
We’re representing a major proprietary trading firm with a substantial technology presence in Chicago, where engineering teams build and operate the systems underpinning highly automated financial markets. Its production environment combines software, infrastructure and operational engineering, with reliability and controlled change directly affecting the firm's ability to develop and deploy trading technology.
This position sits within Production Engineering and is primarily a software and systems engineering role rather than traditional production support. The team is responsible for improving how technology reaches and operates in production - increasing deployment safety, strengthening observability, reducing manual intervention and creating more consistent ways of managing critical environments. You’ll take hands-on ownership across deployment engineering, Python tooling, monitoring and selected production systems, working closely with software developers, infrastructure engineers and operational stakeholders. Alongside delivering your own projects end-to-end, you’ll help establish stronger engineering practices across production and provide technical guidance to less experienced engineers...
Key Responsibilities
- Design and engineer deployment workflows covering validation, testing, controlled rollout and post-release verification across critical production environments
- Build and improve monitoring and observability capabilities that provide meaningful service visibility, earlier incident detection and actionable alerting
- Develop Python-based tooling and automation that removes repetitive operational work, standardises environments and improves production reliability
- Own selected production systems through their full lifecycle, including implementation, deployment, operation, troubleshooting and continuous improvement
- Diagnose complex problems across Linux, networking, server infrastructure, databases and application layers rather than treating individual components in isolation
- Partner with software, infrastructure and operational engineering teams to improve feedback loops, release practices and the overall management of production change
- Collaborate with engineering teams internationally to improve consistency between production environments while accommodating legitimate regional requirements
- Take work from problem definition through design, implementation, testing, release and monitoring, while contributing technical guidance and mentoring within the team
What You’ll Bring…
- Around 5-9 years of experience across production engineering, SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure software engineering or another hands-on role supporting critical production systems
- Strong Python programming ability with evidence of building maintainable production tooling or software rather than relying primarily on basic operational scripting
- Broad systems engineering knowledge spanning Linux, networking, server infrastructure, databases and application behaviour, with the ability to troubleshoot across layers
- Strong experience designing or improving CI/CD and production-change processes, including validation, deployment safety, rollback or verification considerations
- Practical observability experience across metrics, monitoring, logging and alerting, combined with the ability to use telemetry to diagnose and prevent production issues
- Evidence of owning important production services or infrastructure and improving their reliability, scalability, consistency or operational efficiency
- A degree in Computer Science or another relevant technical discipline
- (Preferred) Production programming experience with Go or Rust alongside Python
- (Preferred) Exposure to technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker or Podman, Ansible, Jenkins, HashiCorp Vault and Python service frameworks, or experience within trading and financial-markets environments
...
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