NinjaTrader Innovation & Technology Culture

What is your role on the IT team? What are your responsibilities?
I’m a systems administrator on the NinjaTrader IT team, where I manage and support the backbone of our technical operations. My responsibilities include overseeing our network infrastructure and administering key SaaS platforms to ensure secure, reliable access for the organization.

In addition to daily operations, I lead and support infrastructure projects that improve performance, enhance security and streamline how our teams work.

How does your employer support IT professionals? What opportunities for learning and growth are offered? How does your team effectively work together?
NinjaTrader supports IT professionals by promoting continuous learning — whether through paid training, hands-on exposure to new tools or involvement in complex high-impact projects. There’s always room to grow and expand your skill set.

Our team operates with a strong sense of collaboration. Everyone is quick to jump in, share knowledge and work together to resolve issues efficiently. It’s a supportive environment where teamwork really drives success.

Why might someone want to join your company’s IT team? What routines, traditions and perks does your team offer?
Someone would want to join NinjaTrader’s IT team for the chance to work on meaningful, hands-on projects alongside a team that truly values collaboration, initiative and individual contributions. It’s a place where your ideas matter and your work makes a real impact.

The team also benefits from great perks like certification reimbursement, paid group training and a hybrid work environment that supports flexibility and work-life balance. It’s a supportive culture that encourages both personal and professional growth.

What’s your rule for fast, safe releases — and what KPI proves it works?

Speed is a byproduct of safety, not a tradeoff against it. That’s our rule.

NinjaTrader serves over 2.5 million customers globally in a low-latency trading environment that runs 24/7. When you operate at that scale, a bad release doesn’t just frustrate users. It can move real money in the wrong direction, trigger regulatory scrutiny and erode the trust that traders place in us every time they put capital at risk. Shipping recklessly is irresponsible.

So, we’ve built a release culture where guardrails actually accelerate us rather than slow us down. Every release passes through progressive exposure gates. We use feature flags to control rollout and easy rollbacks. Real-time telemetry monitors the operational metrics that actually matter for a trading business, like order execution accuracy and latency. 

We also enforce what I call a “no surprises” principle. If a change touches the order lifecycle or risk systems, it goes through a heavier review gate, with our chief architect and other senior engineers who understand the complexity of the trading domain and the distributed systems.

What standard or metric defines “quality” in your stack?

Quality in our stack comes down to two metrics that work together: bug escape rate and bug pickup SLO.

Bug escape rate tells us how many defects make it past our testing and review gates into production. This is the upstream signal. It measures how good our process is at catching problems before customers see them. When this number spikes, it means something in our pipeline needs attention, whether that’s test coverage, code review rigor or the complexity of what we’re shipping.

Bug pickup SLO is the downstream signal. Once a bug does escape, how fast do we respond? Our standard is that 90 percent of bug PRs must be picked up within 24 hours. In a 24/7 trading environment, a bug sitting in a queue isn’t just a backlog item. It’s a risk that compounds with every trading session.

The combination matters. A low escape rate with a slow pickup time means you’re good at prevention but bad at response. A fast pickup time with a high escape rate means you’re just really efficient at fighting fires. You need both.

We track these at the team level, which is where the data gets actionable.

Name one AI/automation that shipped recently and its impact on your team or the business.

We recently rolled out Cursor and Claude Code across our engineering organization and the impact showed up faster than I expected.

The biggest win has been production debugging. Our trading infrastructure is complex — distributed systems, real-time data flows and multiple execution venues. When something breaks in production, the diagnosis often requires an engineer to hold a lot of context in their head at once. We built Claude Skills, reusable prompt templates that encode our system knowledge and debugging patterns. Engineers point Claude at logs, stack traces and the relevant code paths and get to root cause significantly faster. Our mean time to resolution has improved meaningfully. It doesn’t replace the engineer’s judgment, but it compresses the investigation cycle. In a 24/7 trading environment, that time compression directly reduces customer impact.