Senior Data Engineer, Unified Platform

About the firm

DRW is a diversified trading firm with over three 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.

About the role

As a Senior Data Engineer on our Data Experience team, you will play an integral role in bringing vendor datasets into our data platform, governing our centralized data pipelines, consolidating data delivery infrastructure across disparate systems, and working alongside individual Traders, Quantitative Researchers, and Back-Office personnel to best utilize the firm’s data and platform tools.

Responsibilities

• Model, build, and manage data products built atop DRW’s Unified Data Platform.
• Work closely with Data Strategists to determine appropriate data sources and implement processes that onboard and manage new datasets for trading, research, and back-office purposes.
• Design data governance processes that enable discovery, cost-sharing, usage tracking, access controls, and quality control of datasets to address the needs of DRW trading teams and strategies.
• Continually monitor data ingestion pipelines and data quality to ensure stability, reliability, and quality of the data. Design monitoring and quality control software and processes.
• Own the technical aspects of vendor ingestion pipelines, coordinating with vendor relationship managers on upcoming changes, performing routine data operations without breaking internal users, and contributing to the team’s on-call rotation to respond to unanticipated changes.
• Rapidly respond to user requests, identifying platform gaps and self-service opportunities that make the user experience more efficient.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience working with modern data technologies and building data-first products.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Proven ability to work in a collaborative, agile, and fast-paced environment, prioritizing multiple tasks and projects, and efficiently handle the demands of a trading environment.
• Proven ability to deliver rapid results within processes that span multiple stakeholders.
• Strong technical problem-solving skills.

Skills

• Extensive familiarity with SQL and Java or Python, with a proven ability to develop and deliver maintainable data transformations for production data pipelines.
• Experience leveraging data modeling techniques and ability to articulate the trade-offs of different approaches.
• Experience with one or more data processing technologies (e.g. Flink, Spark, Polars, Dask, etc.).
• Experience with multiple data storage technologies (e.g. S3, RDBMS, NoSQL, Delta/Iceberg, Cassandra, Clickhouse, Kafka, etc.) and knowledge of their associated trade-offs.
• Experience with multiple data formats and serialization systems (e.g. Arrow, Parquet, Protobuf/gRPC, Avro, Thrift, JSON, etc.).
• Experience managing data pipeline orchestration systems (e.g. Kubernetes, Argo Workflows, Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, etc.), delving deeply into low-level details.
• Proven experience in managing the operational aspects of large data pipelines such as backfilling datasets, rerunning batch jobs, monitoring event throughput, and handling dead-letter queues.
• Prior experience triaging data quality control processes, correcting data gaps and inaccuracies.

Pay

The annual base salary range for this position is $200,000 to $250,000 depending on the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and relevant skill set. The position is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus.

Benefits

• Group medical, pharmacy, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401k (with discretionary employer match).
• Short and long-term disability insurance.
• Life and AD&D insurance.
• Health savings accounts.
• Flexible spending accounts.