Senior Developer

Role: Senior Developer
Company: Optimal Market Technologies, LLC
Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid)
Compensation: $175,000 - $225,000 base salary, plus discretionary bonus

Position Overview:

We are seeking a Senior Developer to build and own significant parts of our high-performance options trading platform. This is a hands-on role across our multi-technology codebase. You will also work directly with clients, market makers, exchanges, and brokers to understand their needs and turn them into working systems.

We expect strong, fluent use of AI-assisted development tools, ideally Claude Code, as a core part of how you work. You can help raise the team's standard in this area.

Your Primary Responsibilities:

Build and ship:

• Contribute directly to our multi-technology codebase across the trading platform.
• Build features end to end, and take responsibility for them once in production.
• Write tested, documented, modular code that others can own and extend.
• Participate in support rotation (starting 7:30am Eastern).

Domain and clients:

• Work directly with clients, PMMs, exchanges, and brokers to answer technical questions.
• Expand the tools and data we provide our trading experts to review, research and optimize trading.
• Verify and validate specs, and turn them into working implementations.

Tools and productivity:

• Use AI-assisted development fluently, and help set standards, evaluate new tools, and bring the rest of the team up to speed.
• Improve the team's tooling, scripts, and operational workflows as you go.

What We're Looking For:

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, with room for a strong 3+ year candidate who has already worked in execution services.
• Strong, practical ability across C++ and Python.
• Experience supporting and developing Linux-based applications.
• Fluent, demonstrated use of AI-assisted development tools, ideally Claude Code, and the ability to raise standards for others.
• Experience of financial and trading domains, or similarly latency sensitive systems.
• Track record of shipping tested, maintainable code in production.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills; comfortable working directly with clients and counterparties.
• Aptitude for balancing speed of delivery with stability in production environments.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in US options, wholesale, or execution/routing.
• Familiarity with the FIX Protocol.
• SQL, ideally PostgreSQL.
• GoogleTest or similar unit testing frameworks.
• Middleware experience, ideally AERON.
• Experience with performance profiling tools (e.g. perf, gprof).
• Familiarity with sanitizers for debugging memory/concurrency issues (e.g. ASan, UBSan).
• Exposure to code coverage tooling (e.g. gcov, lcov).
• Exposure to Rust.

Why This Role:

You will own real systems and real client relationships from early on, on a small team where your work ships and matters. You will work with a Principal Engineer driving the platform's architecture forward, and you will have room to grow your scope as the firm grows.