Senior Software Engineer

About Us:

Optimal Market Technologies is a FINRA-registered broker-dealer with an innovative platform of wholesale options and execution solutions designed to meet the needs of today’s dynamic market participants. Optimal can quickly and seamlessly enhance its platform, adapt to regulatory changes, and offer a more efficient implementation that scales as clients grow. Optimal is disrupting the US Options Wholesale landscape by introducing a Competition for Order Flow model through which market makers compete for retail flow on our platform based on best execution quality. Additional offerings include an Institutional Alternative Trading System (ATS) for discreet execution and price improvement and Execution Services for institutional-grade routing and algorithmic execution designed to balance price capture, speed, and market impact across trading objectives.

This is an opportunity to work for a fintech start-up and to be an integral part of growing a broker-dealer from the ground up. As a small, hardworking team, we pride ourselves on our entrepreneurial culture and cross-team collaboration. We recently raised funding from several strategic partners and are in a very exciting stage of growth.
Role: Senior Software Developer
Company: Optimal Market Technologies, LLC
Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid)
Compensation: $200,000 - $250,000 base salary, plus discretionary bonus (commensurate with experience)

Position Overview:

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help build our next-generation options trading platform and to maintain and improve the current one.

You will use AI coding agents for much of the development work. That makes code cheap to write; the critical parts are now design judgment, verification and review. This role is for an engineer who is strong in those.

Your Primary Responsibilities:

Design and Build:

- Own a defined part of our next-generation trading platform, from design through release.

- Design for failure: durability, failover and recovery.

- Keep business logic deterministic and testable in isolation, separate from the code that sends messages.

Verify and Review:

- Create discrete tasks with executable acceptance criteria from business specifications.

- Build checks that are independent of the implementation.

- Share code review with the team’s existing reviewers.

AI Tools and productivity:

- We use Claude Code; fluency with it or similar is expected.

- Work with the team to develop shared agent practice.

- Be ready to show us how you actually work with these tools; it’s part of the interview.

Support:

- Take part in the production support rotation.

What We're Looking For:

- 5+ years of professional software engineering, including designing systems where failure has serious financial or regulatory consequences.

- Strong programming and critical code review in statically typed, compiled languages, including C++.

- Production software shipped using AI coding agents, with a method you can explain.

- Experience designing tests that check correctness independently of the implementation.

- Able to turn a business specification into discrete tasks with clear acceptance criteria.

- Basic working use of Python and SQL; deeper experience is a plus.

- Clear communication: you say what you have and have not verified.

- Experience with trading systems or financial markets is a plus.

Why This Role:

You will work on the platform that runs the business today and on its replacement, where the design is still open. The team is small, the work is consequential, and good engineering judgment is what we value most.
Optimal is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.