C++ Senior Engineer - Options Market Making Execution

About the role

Chicago Trading Company (CTC) is a premier proprietary trading firm specializing in options market making. Our collaborative culture fuels innovation in quantitative research, systematic trading strategies, and cutting-edge trading technology. For over three decades CTC has provided critical liquidity across derivatives exchanges worldwide - making them fairer, more transparent, and more efficient.

We strive to be the most innovative firm in the industry today, tomorrow, and long into the future while upholding ethical excellence. We believe that CTC makes a positive impact on the markets, the lives of our employees, and all the communities to which we belong. Started in 1995 by a team of forward-thinking Traders, we are proud to call ourselves an industry leader that keeps making markets and each other better.

Our Options Market Making Execution team is looking for a Senior Engineer to build high-performance, elegant solutions to keep CTC's options trading infrastructure fast, efficient, and competitive. You'll partner with Engineers, Traders, and Quant Researchers to develop and fine-tune execution engines and trading strategies with the goal of reducing latency, maximizing performance and improving P&L. By simplifying system management and constantly improving our options trading engines, you'll ensure our trading infrastructure remains scalable, responsive, and cutting-edge.

What You'll Do

• Design and build high-performance, low-latency trading systems that power our Options Market Making business
• Work closely with traders, quants and technologists to drive ideas from inception to production in a timely and robust manner.
• Partner with other teams such as operations, option pricing, exchange connectivity to ensure your solutions seamlessly integrate into our firmwide trading infrastructure.
• Ensure operational safety and uphold the highest standards of software engineering by thoroughly testing code, following a coherent and maintainable design and architecture, and adhering to best practices-prioritizing carefully planned, well-structured solutions over ad hoc implementations.

What We're Looking for

• A minimum of 5 years of experience working in a production environment using modern C++
• Deep knowledge of low level systems programming, optimization, and hardware/software co-design
• Strong fundamentals in computer architecture and networking protocols
• Experience writing multithreaded and distributed systems with an affinity for delivering clean, performant code
• Ability to quickly triage issues and drive the resolution effort through completion
• Experience working at a high frequency trading firm is preferred

Compensation

The salary range for this role is listed below. This role is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. The discretionary bonus will be dependent upon the individual's skills, experience, qualifications, and firm performance.

Salary Range $200,000—$250,000 USD

Most teams at CTC, with the exception of Trading, follow a hybrid workplace model, subject to change based on business need.

Our Benefits

We strongly believe in the well-being of our employees and their families so we offer outstanding benefits to support you both professionally and personally. These benefits include generous time off, insurance coverage, paid parental leave, free breakfast and lunch (plus healthy snacks, of course), wellness reimbursement, and a variety of other benefits focused on providing the best employee experience.