Software Engineer C jobs in Chicago, IL

Walk me through every place latency can hide between a market data packet hitting the network card and your code making a decision.

What they are checking: Whether they understand the full path across hardware, kernel, memory and code where microseconds go.

How do cache misses affect your code, and how do you design data structures to avoid them?

What they are checking: Deep understanding of CPU architecture, which the posting says engineers use every day.

When do you use templates and compile-time work instead of virtual functions in latency-critical C++?

What they are checking: Whether they know the real cost of language features and pick them on purpose.

Explain how you'd write a lock-free single-producer, single-consumer queue and what memory ordering you'd need.

What they are checking: Knowledge of the C++ memory model and atomics, which are easy to get subtly wrong.

How would you design a system to send prioritized data across a WAN link that sometimes drops packets?

What they are checking: Whether they can reason about encoding, prioritization and recovery for data moving between regions.

A trading process loses its connection when a piece of hardware fails. How should the system recover?

What they are checking: Whether they design for fault tolerance and think through safe states when trading is live.

Tell me about a time you made code meaningfully faster. How did you measure it before and after?

What they are checking: Whether they profile and measure rather than optimizing on intuition alone.

What's the difference between optimizing for throughput and optimizing for tail latency, and when do they conflict?

What they are checking: Whether they understand the tradeoff that the posting describes as the Pareto frontier.