Trading Systems Engineer
DRW is a technology-driven, diversified principal trading firm. We trade our own capital at our own risk, across a broad range of asset classes, instruments and strategies, in financial markets around the world. As the markets have evolved over the past 25 years, so has DRW – maximizing opportunities to include real estate, cryptoassets and venture capital. With nearly 900 employees at our Chicago headquarters and six global offices, we work together to solve complex problems, challenge consensus and deliver meaningful results. It’s a place of high expectations, deep curiosity and thoughtful collaboration.
Our Application Support team provides mission critical support for our core proprietary and third party systems. They manage a wide variety of technical support and engineering functions, including application support in testing and production environments, software deployment and configuration and system monitoring. It’s a fast-paced, dynamic environment that provides new technical challenges constantly and demands that you learn new things daily.
What you’ll do in this role:
- Work as part of a team to establish best-in-class production support, efficient software deployment and configuration processes, and proactive application monitoring processes, with a goal of anticipating and avoiding issues before they occur
- Ensure maximum system availability to avoid missing key trading opportunities
- Provide support for various trading groups’ production systems across a variety of asset classes and geographic locations
- Develop proprietary process automation and monitoring tools and leverage third-party technologies as appropriate
- Provide support for proprietary systems deployed across a multi-platform production environment (primarily Linux with some Windows)
- Troubleshoot time sensitive production incidents resulting from internal (proprietary software / systems) or external factors (markets, data feeds, telecommunication lines)
- Automate software configuration and rollout procedures to reduce manual configuration errors and strive for flawless change management
- Support core market connectivity and correspond with exchanges regarding trade order activity, connectivity, and other related technical support issues
- Work interactively with traders, DBAs, core development teams, back office systems, QA, infrastructure and management teams when deploying production releases and troubleshooting technical issues
- Help end users and developers understand core trading and back-office systems to ensure efficient and correct use of available tools
- Build documentation for common procedures, troubleshooting scenarios and system architecture.
- Coordinate efforts with other global support teams to ensure continuity and consistency of support in a 24x7 environment
What’s needed in this role:
- Superior troubleshooting skills on systems throughout many areas of business and technology on multiple OS platforms with varying degrees of urgency
- Prior experience supporting high performance applications, process monitoring, and troubleshooting
- Prior experience working with FIX protocol and alternative exchange protocols is a plus
- Script development and debugging experience is a must, preferably with Python
- SQL experience including queries/updates/table creation/basic database maintenance is strongly preferred
- Ability to efficiently search many large log files and identify key information
- Multiple years of experience in Linux & Windows platform support required
- Must have previous application support experience in a fast-paced financial services or fintech environment; experience support electronic trading systems highly preferred
- Demonstrated knowledge of network communications, including use of multicast; advanced network communication troubleshooting skills preferred
- B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent degree is preferred
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Must have some flexibility in work schedule to help ensure team coverage; rotating on-call coverage required
- Self-motivation, intellectual curiosity and desire to continually improve production support processes
- High level of ownership and accountability, reliability, and strong follow through
- Ability to handle pressure and time constraints with composure; ability to multitask and context switch efficiently
- Strong organizational skills, including ability to effectively plan and prioritize
- Must be comfortable working collaboratively with many different support teams and end user groups