Roles › Principal Software Engineer
Chicago, IL
Principal Software Engineer jobs in Chicago, IL
4 open roles from 2 employers. Checked Oct 6, 2026.
What these openings look like
2 employers are hiring here: Cboe Global Markets and Northern Trust. Every one publishes a pay range, and they run $137,400 to $235,950 a year. Every posting is full time. The most recent went up on Sep 17, 2026.
Every listing links to the employer's own application. Nothing is posted here on their behalf, and nothing is reposted from anywhere else.
Open roles
What it pays here
Only some employers publish a range. These are the ones that did, as written in their own postings:
- $182,325–$235,950 a year
- $165,750–$235,950 a year
- $137,400–$233,600 a year
What they ask principal software engineer candidates here
Drawn from the 4 open postings on this page. The ones that come up across several employers are near the top.
How would you design an order-handling component for an exchange where every microsecond and every message matters?
What they are checking: Whether they can reason about latency, determinism and correctness together in market infrastructure.
How do you make sure a trading system processes every message exactly once and in the right order?
What they are checking: Whether they understand sequencing, recovery and idempotency, which protect market integrity.
Tell me about the most complex technical problem you solved as a senior engineer. What was your part?
What they are checking: Whether they have led hard technical work and can describe their own contribution clearly.
What's your approach to finding a latency spike that only shows up under peak load?
What they are checking: Whether they can profile and measure carefully, including garbage collection, locks and network effects.
How do you decide when a system needs a redesign instead of more incremental fixes?
What they are checking: Whether they weigh risk, cost and business value when proposing major changes.
How would you roll out a change to a production trading system with minimal risk?
What they are checking: Whether they use testing, feature flags, staged rollouts and rollback plans in critical systems.
Tell me about a time you mentored engineers and raised the quality of a team's work.
What they are checking: Whether they lift others, which is expected at the principal level.
Two senior engineers disagree on a design and both have good points. How do you settle it?
What they are checking: Whether they can lead technical decisions with data and fairness rather than rank.
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