Sr. Data Engineer

About the role

Welcome to the dynamic world of NinjaTrader! As an industry-leading trading platform and futures broker, we're empowering traders to take control of their financial destiny. How do we do it? We provide cutting-edge products and services that enhance the trading journey. Whether a seasoned pro or just starting out, NinjaTrader equips traders with award-winning software and brokerage services to navigate the world's leading financial markets with confidence.

What you'll do:

• Your data-driven mindset and ability to work with large-scale data systems enable NinjaTrader to serve customers better, identify new opportunities, and improve processes.
• As an accomplished data engineer joining the Data & Analytics team, this is a terrific opportunity to become part of a fast-growing, revolutionary fintech company shaping the future of retail futures trading.
• In this role, you will design, build, and maintain robust data pipelines and data lake architecture for both batch and real-time streaming use cases, including high-volume, low-latency data processing.
• You will improve observability, alerting, and SLOs across data systems so pipelines are easier to monitor and issues are caught early.
• You will optimize ETL/ELT workflows for performance, scalability, and fault tolerance.
• You will develop dbt workflows to onboard Evaluation Partners and create end-of-day reporting for partner analysis.
• You will build and support event-driven architectures and scalable platform components.
• You will contribute to the orchestration and automation of workflows.
• You will integrate complex financial APIs and third-party data sources into internal systems.
• You will collaborate with analytics, product, and ML engineers to develop and deploy reliable data products.
• You will work on feature pipelines and model-ready data to support ML engineers.
• You will promote high standards in code quality, testing, and platform reliability.
• You will participate in Agile ceremonies and foster a collaborative, growth-oriented team culture.

What you'll need:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or backend development.
• Strong skills in SQL and Python for building and testing data solutions.
• Hands-on experience with GCP and GCP data products (BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, etc.).
• Experience with AWS cloud services (S3, Glue, Athena, Kinesis) in addition to GCP; bonus for EMR.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and version-controlled deployment workflows (e.g., Terraform, GitOps).
• Hands-on dbt experience building and maintaining dbt projects (models, tests, macros, documentation, CI).
• Proficiency with workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Prefect).
• Knowledge of data lake architecture, including file formats (Parquet, Avro) and open table formats (Apache Iceberg).
• Familiarity with event-driven and service-oriented architecture.
• A track record of building automated, well-tested, and observable data systems.
• Comfortable working both independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced Agile environment.

Bonus points for:

• Hands-on Kubernetes experience, especially around data workloads and containerized pipelines.
• Experience with streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka, Spark Streaming, Flink) and comfort working with high-volume, low-latency data flows.
• Experience with change data capture tools (e.g., Debezium, Kafka Connect) and real-time data integration patterns.
• Experience with BI tools like Looker Studio or QuickSight.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tooling (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus).

Compensation:

The salary range for this role will be $100,000.00 - $150,000.00 USD. In addition, this position will also receive an annual target bonus of 10%. Bonus pay at NinjaTrader is based on individual performance (50%) as well as company/team performance (50%). Salary and bonus earnings are only two components of the total compensation package offered by NinjaTrader. NinjaTrader offers a 401K plan through ADP under which the company will match up to 3.5% of employee contributions. Annual paid time off allowance accrues at a rate of 18 days per year (some positions may qualify for more) plus seven paid holidays.

Location:

This role is based in Chicago, IL. There may be remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, Wisconsin.

Hybrid:

For Chicago-based employees, we follow a hybrid work schedule: In-office Tuesday through Thursday, with remote work on Mondays and Fridays. In addition to these weekly remote days, we offer: 20 additional flex remote days annually, 5 Company Wide Office-Optional weeks tied to major holidays.

Our Core Benefits Include:

• Generous PTO
• 7 Paid Holidays Annually + 5 Conditional Holidays Annually
• 1 Service Day Annually
• 401k with 3.5% Company Match
• Paid Parental Bonding Leave
• Health, Vision, Dental Coverage
• Life and Disability Insurance Covered 100% by NinjaTrader