Sr. Data Engineer

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.

At NinjaTrader, you'll play a key role in designing and operationalizing the modern data platform that powers our analytics, trading tools, and AI initiatives. This role is remote-friendly and reports to the Manager, Data & Analytics Engineering.

As a Sr. Data Engineer, your primary responsibility is to stay one step ahead of your fellow team members by providing the platform, tools, and infrastructure they need to deliver deployable solutions to real-world business problems. This goes beyond maintaining pipelines—it's about delivering best-in-class data architecture, scalable workflows, and real-time solutions that power trading, product development, and machine learning.

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
• Improve observability, alerting, and SLOs across data systems so pipelines are easier to monitor and issues are caught early
• Optimize ETL/ELT workflows for performance, scalability, and fault tolerance
• Develop dbt workflows to onboard Evaluation Partners and create end-of-day reporting for partner analysis
• Build and support event-driven architectures and scalable platform components
• Contribute to the orchestration and automation of workflows
• Integrate complex financial APIs and third-party data sources into internal systems
• Collaborate with analytics, product, and ML engineers to develop and deploy reliable data products
• Work on feature pipelines and model-ready data to support ML engineers
• Promote high standards in code quality, testing, and platform reliability
• 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)
• Background in fintech, trading, or derivatives

Compensation:

The salary range for this role will be $110,000.00 - $160,000.00 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.* 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

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