Sr. Software Engineer II, Backend (Rust)

Join us on our mission to become the #1 retail trading platform in the world. As an industry-leading trading platform and futures broker, NinjaTrader empowers traders with award-winning software and brokerage services to navigate global financial markets. With over 2 million users and a top-rated futures brokerage, we're innovating to modernize the futures industry through dynamic tools, real-time support, and a vibrant trading community.

About the role

NinjaTrader's identity and verification platform is built in Rust and sits on the critical path for every new customer. We're hiring a Sr. Software Engineer II with deep Rust expertise to own this surface end-to-end: provider/vendor integrations, verification logic, and asynchronous delivery of outcomes into downstream systems. As the senior-most Rust engineer on the Onboarding squad, your work will directly impact approval rates, time-to-funding, and our ability to expand into new markets.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain Rust services and crates that power account creation, identity verification, and KYC/CIP decisioning
• Build integrations with identity, fraud, and screening providers, including response modeling, deserialization, and fixture-based scenarios for deterministic testing
• Write determination logic as pure, table-tested functions with a single authoritative definition of each rule
• Design asynchronous, task-based delivery of outcomes to downstream systems with idempotency keys, retry/resumption semantics, and completion gates
• Own data-handling correctness for flows carrying PII and identity documents, covering redaction, encryption, secret management, and audit logging
• Express market and product differences as policy and configuration to enable jurisdiction support through policy changes rather than refactoring
• Operate what you build: instrumentation, structured logging, alerting, and incident response for services where silent failures impact customer funding
• Design and implement scalable, reliable service architecture using Google Cloud Platform and Kubernetes
• Act as the onboarding domain's authority during cross-functional Rust design reviews, brokering technical contracts with external teams and mentoring engineers

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional software development experience, including substantial production Rust
• Strong command of Rust in production: ownership/lifetimes, error modeling, trait design, async ecosystem (tokio), serde, and SQL layers like sqlx or diesel
• Demonstrated ability to write highly testable Rust: pure functions at decision boundaries, table-driven tests, fixture-based integration testing, and strict contract tests
• Proven experience designing HTTP and event-driven service integrations with versioning and backward compatibility
• Experience handling sensitive data under real constraints (encryption, secret management, least-privilege access, audit requirements) in containerized cloud environments
• Demonstrated use of AI coding agents (Codex, Cursor, Claude Code) as part of your engineering workflow with proper review/validation
• Excellent communication skills for driving technical contracts with teams outside your reporting line
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience)

Nice to have

• Experience with identity verification, KYC/AML, CIP, or fraud/risk decisioning systems
• Fintech, trading, brokerage, or crypto experience, particularly in regulated financial services
• Experience in large Rust monorepos with shared crates, workspace tooling, and multi-team code ownership
• Familiarity with policy-driven flow engines, schema-driven contracts (gRPC/protobuf), and feature flagging platforms like Statsig
• Passion for futures, crypto, derivatives, and trading technologies

Pay

The salary range for this role is $140,000 - $190,000 USD. This position also includes an annual target bonus of 12%, split between individual performance (50%) and company/team performance (50%).

Schedule

This role follows a hybrid work schedule for Chicago-based employees: in-office Tuesday through Thursday, with remote work on Mondays and Fridays. Additional benefits include 20 flex remote days annually and 5 company-wide office-optional weeks tied to major holidays.

Remote flexibility may be available for exceptional candidates in select 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, and Washington DC.

Benefits

• Generous PTO accruing at 18 days per year plus 7 paid holidays and 5 conditional holidays
• 1 service day annually
• 401k with 3.5% company match
• Paid parental bonding leave
• Health, vision, and dental coverage
• Life and disability insurance covered 100% by NinjaTrader