Director of Engineering, Trading Platforms

Chicago or Remote*

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JOIN US ON OUR MISSION TO BECOME THE #1 RETAIL TRADING PLATFORM IN THE WORLD

Welcome to the dynamic world of Ninja Trader! As an industry-leading trading platform and futures broker, we're on a mission to empower traders to take control of their financial destiny. How do we do it? We provide cutting-edge products and services that enhance the trading journey. Whether a seasoned pro or just starting out, Ninja Trader equips traders with award-winning software and brokerage services to navigate the world's leading financial markets with confidence.

Our growth story is nothing short of exhilarating. Over the last 20 years, Ninja Trader has been dedicated to understanding and supporting traders on their journey toward trading triumph. In the last five years alone, our user base has grown by 400% to over 1.9 million users and we have become the number one rated futures brokerage worldwide.

But we're not stopping there. We're constantly evolving, pushing boundaries, and modernizing the futures industry. Our commitment to innovation means users will always have access to dynamic tools, real-time support, and a community of like-minded traders.

So, why work at Ninja Trader? Here, you're not just part of a team; you're part of a movement. We empower employees to reach new heights in their careers by providing a dynamic culture focused on social connection, professional development, and employee recognition initiatives. Sounds too good to be true? Take it from our employees.

Join us as we redefine what's possible in trading, advocate for our customers, and continue our journey toward becoming the world's top retail-focused trading platform in the world.

What you'll do:

Ninja Trader is modernizing the core of our high-throughput trading stack. We are seeking aDirector of Engineering to own the end-to-end technical strategy and execution for our server-side trading platform—the matching engines, market-data services, risk controls, and order-routing pipelines that power millions of trades daily. You will lead multiple backend engineers, shape our cloud-native architecture, and ensure our systems remain low-latency, highly concurrent, and horizontally scalable as we grow.

In this role you will:

• Manage multiple engineering managers, fostering a high-performing organization and cultivating a culture of continuous improvement, quality, and reliability
• Attract, retain, and grow top-tier talent to build exceptional engineering teams that deliver delightful trading experiences
• Define and evolve the technical roadmap for the trading platform (matching, risk, market data, connectivity, clearing)
• Work closely with the CTO and Chief Architect to shape and refine the overarching engineering strategy
• Partner with SRE to enforce “everything-as-code” infrastructure (Terraform) and progressive deployment pipelines (FluxCD)
• Champion Open Telemetry-first, vendor-agnostic observability that scales cost-effectively
• Collaborate with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Customer Success to translate trading-business objectives into robust backend capabilities

What you'll need:

• 15+ years of total software engineering experience, with 5+ years leading multiple backend or platform teams in a trading setup
• Proven track record building and operating low-latency, high-concurrency trading, market-data, or high-frequency messaging systems (equities, futures, FX, crypto, or similar)
• Deep knowledge of performance-oriented programming on the JVM (Scala, Java, Kotlin) or C++/Rust/Go, plus comfort reviewing code in any modern language
• Mastery of event-driven, partitioned, and stateful services (e.g., Kafka/Pub-Sub, Aeron, Redis, in-memory caches)
• Kubernetes/GKE experience and a strong automation-first mindset using CI/CD tools like Argo CD and Git Hub Actions
• Demonstrated success implementing observability…