Director of Engineering, Trading Platforms

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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 empower traders to take control of their financial destiny. We provide cutting-edge products and services that enhance the trading journey for both seasoned professionals and beginners alike. Ninja Trader equips traders with award-winning software and brokerage services to navigate the world's leading financial markets with confidence.

Our growth story began in 2003. We have supported over 2 million users and are the number one rated futures brokerage worldwide. We continuously evolve to modernize the futures industry, offering dynamic tools, real-time support, and a community of like-minded traders.

Why work at Ninja Trader? You’ll be part of a movement that empowers employees to reach new heights through a dynamic culture focused on social connection, professional development, and employee recognition initiatives. Join us as we redefine what’s possible in trading and advocate for our customers as we work toward becoming the world’s top retail-focused trading platform.

What you’ll do: Ninja Trader is modernizing the core of our high-throughput trading stack. We are seeking a Director 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 at scale using Open Telemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and log pipelines with cost-efficiency in mind
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills; comfortable defending architectural trade-offs to executive, product, and regulatory audiences
• Experience integrating with clearing firms, FIX gateways, and risk engines
• Familiarity with Scala, Akka/Pekko actor systems, and reactive-streams back pressure patterns
• Experience with Google Cloud (GKE, Cloud Logging, Big Query)

Compensation: The…