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Senior Software Engineer, Unified Platform - Trade Management, Trade and Order Processing, Platform Services

DRW · Chicago, IL · $175,000–$275,000 a year · UP - Unified Platform

Posted Aug 19, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Oct 6, 2026

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Likely interview questions for this role

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

About your past

Unified Platform pulls data and technologies together so new trading ideas reach market faster. Walk me through a platform you built that other teams depended on, and how you decided what belonged in it.

What they are checking: Whether they think about a shared platform as a product with users, not just a pile of reusable code.

We work from high-level requirements and expect developers to learn the business deeply. Tell me about a time you had to understand trading or another domain well enough to push back on what was asked for.

What they are checking: Whether they dig into the business problem themselves instead of waiting for a fully written spec.

DRW values autonomy. Describe a time you had a lot of freedom on a project. How did you decide what to work on and keep others informed?

What they are checking: Whether they use autonomy to deliver business value and stay visible, rather than drifting into side projects.

How do you mentor less experienced engineers on a platform team without becoming the bottleneck for every decision?

What they are checking: Whether a senior hire spreads knowledge and ownership so the team scales beyond them.

Tell me about a design decision you made that turned out to be wrong. What did you do once you realized it?

What they are checking: Whether they put finding the right answer ahead of being right, which the firm says it values.

What would you do

An order processing service drops a small number of messages during a market spike. How do you find out where they went and make sure it cannot happen quietly again?

What they are checking: Whether they combine calm debugging with lasting fixes like sequence checks, alerts and replay instead of a one-off patch.

Two trading desks want the platform to behave in opposite ways for the same workflow. How do you handle that?

What they are checking: Whether they can find a general design that serves both, or make and explain a clear call, without forking the platform.

About the work

How would you design a trade management service that receives fills from several venues and has to keep a single correct view of positions?

What they are checking: Their grasp of ordering, idempotency and reconciliation when the same trade can arrive late, twice or out of sequence.

How do you design an API for a platform service so that desks can build on it without you having to change it every week?

What they are checking: Their judgment about stable contracts, versioning and extension points that let other teams move without blocking on the platform.

Tell me about a time you made a system meaningfully faster. How did you find the bottleneck, and how did you prove the change helped?

What they are checking: Whether they measure before and after rather than optimizing from hunches, which matters where latency costs money.

What is your approach to testing code that touches live order flow, where a bug can mean real losses?

What they are checking: How seriously they treat correctness, and whether they use replay, simulation and staged rollouts beyond unit tests.

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The full job description

As published by DRW.

DRW is a diversified trading firm with over 3 decades of experience bringing sophisticated technology and exceptional people together to operate in markets around the world. We value autonomy and the ability to quickly pivot to capture opportunities, so we operate using our own capital and trading at our own risk. Headquartered in Chicago with offices throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, we trade a variety of asset classes including Fixed Income, ETFs, Equities, FX, Commodities and Energy across all major global markets. We have also leveraged our expertise and technology to expand into three non-traditional strategies: real estate, venture capital and cryptoassets. We operate with respect, curiosity and open minds. The people who thrive here share our belief that it’s not just what we do that matters–it's how we do it. DRW is a place of high expectations, integrity, innovation and a willingness to challenge consensus. UP (Unified Platform) consolidates data and technologies into a comprehensive solution, accelerating time to market. Optimizing decision-making and research, our platform simplifies implementing new ideas, enhancing our competitive edge. We work from high-level requirements where programmers are expected to gain an intimate understanding of the business. We strive for an environment where developers have the autonomy to pursue business solutions without arbitrary management constraints. We are a group of polyglots and technologists always seeking to find the right tool for each problem. Broadly, the development teams at DRW believe in rapid deployment and feedback, automated testing, and cohesive, transparent, lightly coupled service architectures.  UP teams are segmented into multiple areas including:  Platform Engineering - Teams within platform engineering provide cross-cutting capabilities that enable other teams to focus on domain- or business-specific needs by streamlining and standardizing technical approaches. For example, one of these teams provides data table, identity and access management, and pub-sub capabilities as a service to engineering teams.  Domain Engineering - Teams within domain engineering have critical capabilities that extend beyond a single trading strategy or business area. They build services and data products to optimize a broad array of use cases. For example, one team processes third-party trade and order feeds in real time to keep DRW informed of its trading activity. Another team manages DRW’s proprietary investment book of record providing latency-sensitive ingestion of the firm’s trading activity and providing both real-time and on-demand analytics. We are passionate about finding the best team and role for each candidate through the interview process, as we learn more about each person's current skills and long-term development goals.  Expectations:   • Building systems with a constant focus on testing, reliability, scalability, and maintainability. • Designing, modeling, and programming in a variety of languages and technologies.  • Working on legacy code as well as green field development. • Initiative driving projects to completion. • Learning and promoting new technologies with a focus on best practices. • Providing on-call support as needed. • Sometimes working alongside other developers on the same task.  Desirable Experience:   We are looking for strong developers of any stripe, but familiarity with the below will give candidates a leg up in working on our systems.  • Multiple years of server-side development. • A solid understanding of micro-service architectures and CAP theorem. • A good understanding of functional paradigms and type theory. • Confident JVM knowledge. • Modern programming languages knowledge in our primary languages (Java, Python, Clojure). • Experience with Airflow or other Python-based workflow orchestration tools. • Proficiency in domain-driven design and domain modeling. • Exposure to Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or git. • Working knowledge of SQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. • Using AI coding assistants to accelerate development while owning the outcome. • Exposure to agentic frameworks or MCP server development. • Knowledge of financial concepts, exchange trading, or physical energy trading.  The annual base salary range for this position is $175,000 to $275,000 depending on the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and relevant skill set. The position is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. In addition, DRW offers a comprehensive suite of employee benefits including group medical, pharmacy, dental and vision insurance, 401k (with discretionary employer match), short and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance, health savings accounts, and flexible spending accounts. For more information about DRW's processing activities and our use of job applicants' data, please view our Privacy Notice at https://drw.com/privacy-notice . California residents, please review the California Privacy Notice for information about certain legal rights at https://drw.com/california-privacy-notice . [#LI-TL1]  

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