JobsChicago Trading Company

C++ Senior Engineer - Market Data

Chicago Trading Company · Chicago, IL · Technology

Posted Sep 11, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Sep 20, 2026

Apply at Chicago Trading Company

Likely interview questions for this role

Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.

Behavioral

Tell me about a time you had to co-design something across software and hardware, like tuning for NIC offload, kernel bypass, or CPU cache behavior.

real experience with hardware/software co-design as claimed in the posting, not just theoretical knowledge

Tell me about a time you had to push back on a quant or trader who wanted something built fast and ad hoc, when you believed it needed a more careful design.

ability to balance engineering rigor against business urgency without being obstructive

Tell me about a project where you worked closely with traders or quants from idea to production. What did that collaboration actually look like day to day?

whether the candidate can operate effectively across the trader-engineer boundary this role requires

Describe the worst production incident you've been part of that involved market data or a similarly time-critical system. What broke, and what changed afterward?

ownership, honesty about failure, and whether lessons translated into lasting process or design improvements

Why are you interested in market data specifically, rather than trading strategy or execution systems?

genuine motivation and fit for a role that is foundational but less visible than strategy-facing engineering

Technical

Walk me through a low-latency feed handler you built or worked on. What market data protocol was it parsing, and where did the time actually go?

whether the candidate has hands-on depth with real feed handler internals versus surface familiarity with the term

Say you're parsing MDP3 or ITCH messages and you need to shave microseconds off the hot path. Where do you start looking, and how do you measure whether a change actually helped?

practical grasp of profiling and optimization discipline rather than guesswork tuning

How do you think about memory layout and cache lines when you're writing a struct that will be touched on every single market data update?

depth in low-level systems programming and mechanical sympathy with modern CPUs

Describe a multithreaded system you built where correctness and latency were both non-negotiable. What synchronization approach did you use and why?

ability to reason about concurrency tradeoffs like lock-free structures versus locks under real latency constraints

What do you know about how exchanges like CME or Nasdaq structure their market data feeds, and how does that shape the way you design a handler for them?

specific protocol-level knowledge beyond generic networking, tied to the named protocols in the posting

How would you design a distributed system that fans out normalized market data to dozens of downstream trading strategies with minimal added latency?

system design ability at the scale and latency sensitivity this platform demands

Situational

A trading strategy team tells you the market data feed looks 'off' but they can't say exactly how. Walk me through how you'd triage that.

speed and rigor of debugging under ambiguity, a skill explicitly called out in the posting

If a market data feed suddenly starts dropping packets or arriving out of order during live trading, what's your immediate plan, and how does the fix differ if it's a network issue versus a bug in your handler?

operational judgment and understanding of failure modes in production trading infrastructure

Practice this interview out loud.

Offer builds a real interview for this exact role at Chicago Trading Company from your resume and this job description, asks the questions one at a time, and tells you what landed. The first one is free.

Practice this out loud

The full job description

As published by Chicago Trading Company.

<div class="content-intro"><p>Chicago Trading Company (CTC) is a premier proprietary trading firm specializing in options market making. &nbsp;Our collaborative culture fuels innovation in quantitative research, systematic trading strategies, and cutting-edge trading technology. &nbsp;For over three decades CTC has provided critical liquidity across derivatives exchanges worldwide - making them fairer, more transparent, and more efficient.</p> <p>We strive to be the most innovative firm in the industry today, tomorrow, and long into the future while upholding ethical excellence. We believe that CTC makes a positive impact on the markets, the lives of our employees, and all the communities to which we belong. Started in 1995 by a team of forward-thinking Traders, we are proud to call ourselves an industry leader that keeps making markets and each other better.</p></div><p>&nbsp;</p> <p>As a Senior Engineer on the Market Data team, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring reliable and fast delivery of the market data that is foundational to our trading systems. You will build high-performance libraries and services that process vast amounts of real-time data from financial venues across the world—data that all of our trading systems depend on to make critical decisions in the timeframe of microseconds to nanoseconds. Your work will be foundational to every trading strategy we run, and your contributions will be essential to maintaining CTC's competitive edge in this fast-paced trading environment.</p> <p><strong>WHAT YOU'LL DO</strong></p> <ul> <li>Design and build high-performance, low-latency libraries and services that power our global trading platform</li> <li>Work closely with traders, quants and technologists to drive ideas from inception to production in a timely and robust manner.</li> <li>Partner closely with other teams such as execution, low-latency and hardware to design and deliver solutions for our next-generation market data platform</li> <li>Ensure operational safety and uphold the highest standards of software engineering by thoroughly testing code, following a coherent and maintainable design and architecture, and adhering to best practices—prioritizing carefully planned, well-structured solutions over ad hoc implementations.</li> </ul> <p><strong>WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR</strong></p> <ul> <li>A minimum of 5 years of experience working in a production environment using modern C++</li> <li>Experience with low-latency feed handler development, market data protocols (e.g. MDP3, ITCH)</li> <li>Deep knowledge of low level systems programming, optimization, and hardware/software co-design</li> <li>Strong fundamentals in computer architecture and networking protocols</li> <li>Experience writing multithreaded and distributed systems with an affinity for delivering clean, performant code</li> <li>Ability to quickly triage issues and drive the resolution effort through completion</li> <li>Experience working at a high frequency trading firm is preferred</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description"><p><strong>Compensation</strong></p> <p>The salary range for this role is listed below. This role is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. The discretionary bonus will be dependent upon the individual’s skills, experience, qualifications, and firm performance.&nbsp;</p></div><div class="title">Salary Range</div><div class="pay-range"><span>$225,000</span><span class="divider">&mdash;</span><span>$250,000 USD</span></div></div></div><div class="content-conclusion"><p>Most teams at CTC, with the exception of Trading, follow a hybrid workplace model, subject to change based on business need.</p> <p><strong>Our Benefits&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>We strongly believe in the well-being of our employees and their families so we offer outstanding benefits to support you both professionally and personally. These benefits include generous time off, insurance coverage, paid parental leave, free breakfast and lunch (plus healthy snacks, of course), wellness reimbursement, and a variety of other benefits focused on providing the best employee experience.&nbsp;</p> <p><em>(Disclaimer: interns and contractors are not eligible for benefits at CTC)&nbsp;</em></p> <p><strong>Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion</strong></p> <p>At CTC, we aim to cultivate a workplace that celebrates diversity and each person feels included, engaged and empowered. Where each of us feels we belong. We are committed to having a diverse workforce and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. CTC does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.&nbsp;</p> <p>If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or to apply for a position, please contact us at info@chicagotrading.com. Note that emails sent to this email account for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.</p> <p><strong>Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)</strong></p> <p>Information submitted by job applicants may be subject to review and analysis by automated systems, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), as part of the recruitment process. Such systems are utilized to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of our hiring procedures. Applicants are advised that any information provided may be evaluated by AI tools to ensure an equitable and thorough assessment.</p></div>

Apply at Chicago Trading Company

Related jobs

Quant Developer - Research Engineering

Chicago Trading Company · Chicago, IL

Posted Sep 17 · Verified Sep 20

Senior Engineer - Data Ingestion

Chicago Trading Company · Chicago, IL

Posted Sep 17 · Verified Sep 20

Recruiter – Technology (Contract)

Chicago Trading Company · Chicago, IL

Posted Sep 17 · Verified Sep 20

Senior Quantitative Trader - Delta One

Chicago Trading Company · Chicago, IL

Posted Sep 14 · Verified Sep 20

Equity Research Analyst

Chicago Trading Company · Chicago, IL

Posted Sep 11 · Verified Sep 20

Senior Compensation Analyst

Chicago Trading Company · Chicago, IL

Posted Sep 11 · Verified Sep 20