Sr. Data Engineer

NinjaTrader is a fintech company providing a retail trading platform and futures brokerage services. The Senior Data Engineer will design and operationalize the modern data platform, building scalable pipelines, data lake architecture, workflows, and real-time solutions that support analytics, trading tools, product development, and machine learning.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain robust data pipelines and data lake architecture for both batch and real-time streaming use cases, including high-volume, low-latency data processing
• Improve observability, alerting, and SLOs across data systems so pipelines are easier to monitor and issues are caught early
• Optimize ETL/ELT workflows for performance, scalability, and fault tolerance
• Develop dbt workflows to onboard Evaluation Partners and create end-of-day reporting for partner analysis
• Build and support event-driven architectures and scalable platform components
• Contribute to the orchestration and automation of workflows
• Integrate complex financial APIs and third-party data sources into internal systems
• Collaborate with analytics, product, and ML engineers to develop and deploy reliable data products
• Work on feature pipelines and model-ready data to support ML engineers
• Promote high standards in code quality, testing, and platform reliability
• Participate in Agile ceremonies and foster a collaborative, growth-oriented team culture

Requirements:

• • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• • 5+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or backend development
• • Strong skills in SQL and Python for building and testing data solutions
• • Hands-on experience with GCP and GCP data products (BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, etc.)
• • Experience with AWS cloud services (S3, Glue, Athena, Kinesis) in addition to GCP; bonus for EMR
• • Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and version-controlled deployment workflows (e.g., Terraform, GitOps)
• • Hands-on dbt experience building and maintaining dbt projects (models, tests, macros, documentation, CI)
• • Proficiency with workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Prefect)
• • Knowledge of data lake architecture, including file formats (Parquet, Avro) and open table formats (Apache Iceberg)
• • Familiarity with event-driven and service-oriented architecture
• • A track record of building automated, well-tested, and observable data systems
• • Comfortable working both independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced Agile environment
• This role is based in Chicago, IL
• There may be remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois (outside the Chicago area), Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, Wisconsin
• • Hands-on Kubernetes experience, especially around data workloads and containerized pipelines
• • Experience with streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka, Spark Streaming, Flink) and comfort working with high-volume, low-latency data flows
• • Experience with change data capture tools (e.g., Debezium, Kafka Connect) and real-time data integration patterns
• • Experience with BI tools like Looker Studio or QuickSight
• • Experience with observability and monitoring tooling (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus)
• • Background in fintech, trading, or derivatives