Quant Developer - Research Engineering

Chicago Trading Company · Chicago, IL · CTC Trading Group, LLC

Posted Sep 17, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Sep 20, 2026

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

Walk me through a time you took a research prototype a quant wrote and turned it into something that ran reliably in production. What broke along the way and what did you change about the code or the process?

whether the candidate has actually operated the research-to-production handoff, not just written scripts

Tell me about a time you disagreed with a quant or trader about the right way to build something. How did you resolve it?

how they handle technical disagreement with domain experts who outrank them in subject knowledge but not in engineering judgment

Tell me about a piece of evaluation or monitoring tooling you built that let someone else judge whether a model or a signal was actually working.

experience building tooling for others' judgment rather than just running their own analyses

Technical

Tell me about a time you had to optimize numerical code in Python or C++ where the obvious fix wasn't fast enough. What did profiling actually show you, and what did you do differently once you saw it?

real hands-on profiling experience versus generic claims of writing fast code

How would you use numpy or pandas to vectorize a rolling regression across thousands of symbols, and where would you expect that approach to fall apart at scale?

depth of numpy/pandas fluency and awareness of memory and performance limits, not just syntax knowledge

Describe a data pipeline you built or maintained that had to run reliably every day without someone babysitting it. What did you put in place so you'd know when it silently went wrong?

understanding of observability and reproducibility, which the posting explicitly calls out as a requirement

When you're looking at a backtest result, what makes you suspicious that you're looking at noise instead of a real signal?

statistical judgment around overfitting and false signals, which the posting flags as a needed skill

Have you migrated a pipeline from one data platform to another, say something old and homegrown onto something like Iceberg or a modern lakehouse? What made that migration harder than expected?

concrete experience with platform migrations and whether they can anticipate hidden costs of such moves

Where does your C++ actually get used day to day, versus where you'd just reach for Python?

honesty about the real boundary of their C++ skill versus a resume claim of proficiency

Situational

Say a researcher hands you a pandas notebook that takes six hours to run over a year of options data and asks if you can speed it up before their deadline tomorrow. How do you approach it?

practical profiling instinct and prioritization under time pressure rather than jumping to a rewrite

You own a shared dataset that three different desks depend on, and one of them wants a schema change that would make their life easier but might break the other two. How do you handle that conversation?

stakeholder management when priorities conflict, and whether they think about downstream consumers before making changes

A researcher comes to you with a vague idea, something like 'I want to see if this signal decays faster in high-vol regimes.' How do you turn that into an actual design for data and tooling?

ability to translate ambiguous research asks into concrete technical scope, a core part of this role

You've shipped a fast, correct-enough version of a tool for researchers, but you know there's a cleaner architecture you didn't have time to build. How do you decide when to go back and fix it versus move on?

the pragmatism-versus-craftsmanship tradeoff the posting explicitly values

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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.  Our collaborative culture fuels innovation in quantitative research, systematic trading strategies, and cutting-edge trading technology.  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>As a Quantitative Developer you will work at the boundary between quantitative research and production engineering, building the systems and datasets our researchers and traders depend on. You will partner directly with quants across the firm, and own the infrastructure that turns research ideas into results that can be trusted and repeated.</p> <p><strong data-prosemirror-content-type="mark" data-prosemirror-mark-name="strong">What You'll Do</strong></p> <ul class="ak-ul" data-local-id="1ec5afc8-4b08-47ab-bc55-a4eefe78bafd" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="bulletList" data-prosemirror-node-block="true"> <li data-local-id="82bf7b1b-52a1-4c50-9cf5-99d5dc97f55c" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Partner with quantitative researchers and traders to understand their research questions, and design the data, tooling and compute to answer them</li> <li data-local-id="d0a89be0-26a2-47a4-aada-65d30b78d6ca" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Build, operate and optimise the pipelines and execution frameworks behind our research and backtesting</li> <li data-local-id="e73175d9-22c7-47ca-8a61-380d183826d9" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Take research prototypes into production, with the reliability, reproducibility and observability that production requires</li> <li data-local-id="e04a475f-6d40-4929-9cc5-4e1108e6227c" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Own foundational shared datasets used across multiple desks, including their quality and timeliness</li> <li data-local-id="d178efbf-f2a8-4c82-93a1-5808ee5d9b61" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Profile and optimise performance-critical numerical code, balancing runtime against compute and storage cost</li> <li data-local-id="1f9d3ab9-2e9e-4fe5-9ef3-6d197bbeb4f6" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Migrate existing research pipelines onto modern data platforms, and improve the process for the migrations that follow</li> <li data-local-id="18ea7a86-ae98-45f4-82bc-74dbe1bf71f2" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Build evaluation tooling that lets researchers judge model performance</li> <li data-local-id="255e244f-e526-4a04-b204-98673090b309" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Collaborate across the wider data and technology organisation to improve the platform every desk builds on</li> </ul> <p><strong data-prosemirror-content-type="mark" data-prosemirror-mark-name="strong">What We're Looking For</strong></p> <ul class="ak-ul" data-local-id="894d19e7-a15f-4b26-8e35-79d905a421e9" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="bulletList" data-prosemirror-node-block="true"> <li data-local-id="d1c24787-e9df-4e50-9322-0e366db3162c" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Strong Python at production depth - numpy and pandas fluency, vectorisation, and profiling</li> <li data-local-id="2dcef63a-45d1-4a2f-9818-000e376d43ea" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Working proficiency in C++</li> <li data-local-id="c7348a6e-4ddb-411c-aa2c-77727b28a8f3" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Solid quantitative foundations, particularly statistics - probability, regression and time series with the judgement to distinguish signal from noise</li> <li data-local-id="d602424f-fe40-4e20-8da4-79d7876de7aa" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Strong software design skills and hands-on experience building and operating data pipelines at scale</li> <li data-local-id="98c6294f-c53d-4064-8192-4d4b19ddb273" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">The interpersonal skills to work directly with quants and traders, and to turn an ambiguous research need into a concrete design</li> <li data-local-id="983cd6d9-8419-4e34-88df-a0d2e04a94e2" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">A pragmatic bias toward getting something correct and useful into researchers' hands quickly</li> </ul> <p><strong data-prosemirror-content-type="mark" data-prosemirror-mark-name="strong">Nice to Haves</strong></p> <ul class="ak-ul" data-local-id="c496e40b-369d-414d-9b71-1f58fe069379" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="bulletList" data-prosemirror-node-block="true"> <li data-local-id="d0b0347b-fd4e-459a-b4f2-7e45d3f2f0d8" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Experience in options trading, market making, or another trading environment</li> <li data-local-id="f0f71e0e-80ac-416c-842b-5c1c1f77788a" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Backtesting, simulation, or research-platform infrastructure</li> <li data-local-id="ca3135ce-95ea-4e31-869b-b0f22c769b22" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Hands-on experience with a major cloud provider and/or HPC managers</li> <li data-local-id="fdb562a6-9811-46eb-be7e-7e65aa2d1292" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Experience with Apache Iceberg or similar technology</li> <li data-local-id="9cb33cbc-1bdf-455b-bbb1-c7b1f5cf6de1" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">Experience with high volume market data capture</li> <li data-local-id="c4c2b0d83bea" data-prosemirror-content-type="node" data-prosemirror-node-name="listItem" data-prosemirror-node-block="true">C++ Template meta programming experience</li> </ul> <p> </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. </p></div><div class="title">Salary Range</div><div class="pay-range"><span>$175,000</span><span class="divider">—</span><span>$225,000 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 </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. </p> <p><em>(Disclaimer: interns and contractors are not eligible for benefits at CTC) </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. </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>

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Quant Developer - Research Engineering

Likely interview questions for this role

Practice this interview out loud.

The full job description

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