Senior Software Engineer, Finance (Clojure)

Location: Chicago

Department: UP - Finance

DRW is a diversified trading firm with over 3 decades of experience bringing sophisticated technology and exceptional people together to operate in markets around the world. We value autonomy and the ability to quickly pivot to capture opportunities, so we operate using our own capital and trading at our own risk.

Headquartered in Chicago with offices throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, we trade a variety of asset classes including Fixed Income, ETFs, Equities, FX, Commodities and Energy across all major global markets. We have also leveraged our expertise and technology to expand into three non-traditional strategies: real estate, venture capital and cryptoassets.

We operate with respect, curiosity and open minds. The people who thrive here share our belief that it’s not just what we do that matters–it's how we do it. DRW is a place of high expectations, integrity, innovation and a willingness to challenge consensus.

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Unified Platform (UP) team. UP consolidates data and technologies into a comprehensive solution, accelerating time to market. Optimizing decision-making and research, our platform simplifies implementing new ideas, enhancing our competitive edge. The UP-Finance team is responsible for building and operating the systems that underpin DRW's financial accounting, regulatory reporting, reconciliation, and cost basis infrastructure. This team is looking for application software developers who can help with our broad set of challenges.

We work from high-level requirements where programmers are expected to gain an intimate understanding of the business. We strive for an environment where developers have the autonomy to pursue business solutions without arbitrary management constraints. We are a group of polyglots and technologists always seeking to find the right tool for each problem. Broadly, the development teams at DRW believe in rapid deployment and feedback, automated testing, and cohesive, transparent, lightly-coupled service architectures.

What You'll Work On:

• Our systems span the full lifecycle from PnL calculation, general ledger classification, financial reporting and regulatory capital reporting. You'll work across a range of high-impact initiatives including:
  • Delivering on major regulatory, ERP, and financial reporting initiatives
  • Migrating infrastructure to Kubernetes and modernizing our deployment practices
  • Modernizing observability and monitoring across the finance platform
• You'll spend time upfront with accountants, financial analysts, and operations teams to deeply understand business problems, help stakeholders articulate requirements and test assumptions, then turn that into an architecture and a plan. You'll drive your project forward day-to-day, breaking big business requirements into shippable increments and delivering iteratively. This is not a role where you'll be handed detailed specs.
• You'll also spend time reviewing code, providing feedback on design documents, unblocking teammates, and participating in a support rotation.

You'll be right at home if:

• You break large, ambiguous problems into small increments and ship continuously.
• You care deeply about the business domain you work in. You want to understand why the numbers matter, not just how to move them through a pipeline.
• You're comfortable leading a project end-to-end: discovery, architecture, stories, implementation, deployment and support.
• You have strong opinions, loosely held. You challenge ideas constructively and welcome the same in return.
• You focus on reducing operational burden. You'd rather automate a problem away than manage it forever.
• You communicate complex technical topics clearly to both engineers and business partners, and you drive productive debates to resolution.

What we're looking for:

• 5+ years of professional software development experience
• Strength in at least one of Clojure or Python. We have a large Clojure codebase and a growing Python footprint across data pipelines. Experience with Ruby and PL/SQL is also valuable.
• Experience in the finance or accounting domain. You've worked with concepts like PnL, reconciliation, general ledger, regulatory reporting, or cost basis. You don't need to be a CPA, but you should be someone who leans into understanding the business.
• Strong system design skills. You can reason about architectural tradeoffs, distributed systems, and design for reliability and operability
• Solid understanding of relational databases: transactionality, indexing, performance tuning, and data modeling
• Experience building and operating production systems with modern infrastructure (containers, CI/CD pipelines, orchestration)
• A track record of mentoring engineers and contributing to engineering culture and the ambition to grow your technical leadership further

Even better if you bring:

• Deep Python expertise — data pipelines, scheduling, tooling. This is an opportunity to have outsized impact.
• Experience with Clojure or other Lisp-family languages
• Hands-on experience with observability tooling — structured logging, metrics, alerting, anomaly detection
• Familiarity with Oracle, Kafka, or Airflow
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and infrastructure-as-code
• Background in reducing operational toil through automation and better system design

The annual base salary range for this position is $200,000 to $275,000 depending on the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and relevant skill set. The position is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. In addition, DRW offers a comprehensive suite of employee benefits including group medical, pharmacy, dental and vision insurance, 401k (with discretionary employer match), short and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance, health savings accounts, and flexible spending accounts.

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