Staff Quantitative Developer

About the Role

We are seeking a Staff Quantitative Developer to join the team building a core, ultra-low-latency trading system. You will work on the pricing and order-handling logic that drives trading economics at scale. This is a hands-on engineering role embedded within a high-performance, deterministic trading system, working closely with traders, risk, and quant researchers to translate trading logic into production-grade, low-latency code.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement pricing and order-handling logic within a low-latency, deterministic trading engine
• Work on order-lifecycle mechanics specific to trading economics
• Partner with quant researchers and trading desks to translate models and trading strategies into deterministic, testable production code
• Optimize critical-path logic to meet strict end-to-end latency targets
• Participate in system design discussions around state persistence and failover/recovery for a clustered, stateful engine
• Write comprehensive automated tests (unit and behavior-driven) to validate correctness of pricing and trading logic under a wide range of market scenarios
• Participate in code review, on-call rotation, and incident response for a production trading system
• Contribute to capacity planning and performance tuning as trading volumes grow

You Bring

• 6+ years of professional software development experience, including significant time in a senior or lead capacity
• Strong background in quantitative or financial domains-pricing models, market microstructure, order matching, or trading systems
• Proven experience building and maintaining low-latency, high-throughput production systems
• Deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and performance optimization in a JVM-based language
• Experience designing for determinism and reproducibility in systems where correctness and auditability are critical
• Solid grounding in numerical precision and decimal/fixed-point arithmetic, particularly relevant to financial calculations
• Proficiency in quantitative data analysis using data frames or similar tabular tooling (e.g., pandas, Polars, R) for exploring, validating, and back-testing trading logic against historical data
• Strong testing discipline, including behavior-driven or scenario-based testing approaches for complex business logic
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to work directly with traders, risk managers, and quant researchers to clarify requirements
• Experience with distributed systems concepts-consensus/clustering, state replication, and failover
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Finance, or a related quantitative field (or equivalent practical experience)

Special Knowledge (Nice to Have, but Not Required)

• Direct experience working on or adjacent to a broker-dealer, exchange, ATS, or other regulated trading venue
• Familiarity with market data feeds, quote handling, and reference pricing sources
• Exposure to FIX protocol or other trading-industry messaging protocols
• Experience with event-sourced or snapshot-based state persistence and schema/data migration strategies
• Background in capital markets regulatory concepts (best execution, trade reporting, price improvement obligations)
• Experience with streaming/event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka) in a trading or financial context
• Familiarity with container/deployment tooling in regulated, latency-sensitive production environments
• Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in a quantitative discipline
• Prior experience with proprietary or in-house trading platforms/frameworks
• Contributions to open-source performance-critical or financial-systems projects

Location

This role is open to candidates in the following locations: Chicago, IL - Hybrid

• This role is expected to come into the office on a cadence set by the Hiring Manager/Team.
• If you're not based in the location listed above, this role is not a fit, and we cannot accommodate remote work.
• Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. DriveWealth does not sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time.

Pay Range

$220,000 - $240,000 USD

Working at Drivewealth

We do our best work when we're in the same room. To maintain the speed our partners expect, our New York, Chicago, and Lithuania teams work in office on a hybrid schedule. We've found that being physically side-by-side is the only way to solve complex problems in real-time and stay truly accountable to the products we ship. When you're here, you're working directly with the people making the decisions.

To support that work, we provide competitive compensation, equity, and a 401(k) match. We also offer Medical insurance, Dental insurance, Vision insurance, Disability insurance, and Paid Parental Leave, along with a wellness reimbursement, a company-provided phone, and a personal development allowance. Finally, we value the time you spend away from the office with generous Paid Time Off (PTO) and observed holidays.

Work Authorization

Applicants must possess the legal right to work in the country where the position is located at the time of application. DriveWealth requires all employees to provide original documentation verifying their work authorization on or before their first day of employment.

For US-based roles: Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis without the need for current or future visa sponsorship. DriveWealth does not provide visa sponsorship or support for employment authorization, including transfers, at this time. Offers of employment are strictly contingent upon an individual’s ability to secure and maintain the legal right to work at the Company.

How We Think About AI

We leverage AI to work smarter and move faster. We seek AI-curious talent who are proactive about using emerging tools to increase signal quality, reduce friction, and improve outcomes to deliver products faster, provide better service to our partners, and to streamline processes. Your ability to leverage our internal tools and technology to drive results is as important to us as your core domain expertise.

Compensation

Pay is generally based on the level, complexity, responsibility, location, and job duties/requirements of the specific position. We then source candidates with the requisite skills, expertise, education, training, and experience. If you are selected for an interview, please feel welcome to speak to a recruiter about our compensation philosophy and other available benefits. This role is eligible for base, bonus, equity, 401(k) match, and heavily subsidized benefits and perks.