Sr. Data Engineer

What you'll do: 

Your data-driven mindset and ability to use large data sets enable NinjaTrader to serve customers better, identify new opportunities, and improve processes. As an accomplished data engineer joining the Data & AI team, this is a terrific opportunity to become part of a fast-growing, revolutionary fintech company shaping the future of retail futures trading. 

At NinjaTrader, you'll play a key role in designing and operationalizing the modern data platform that powers our analytics, trading tools, and AI initiatives. This role is remote-friendly and reports to the Sr. Engineering Manager, Data Engineering and Analytics. 

As a Sr. Data Engineer, your primary responsibility is to stay one step ahead of your fellow team members by providing the platform, tools, and infrastructure they need to deliver deployable solutions to real-world business problems. This goes beyond maintaining pipelines — it’s about delivering best-in-class data architecture, scalable workflows, and real-time solutions that power trading, product development, and machine learning. 

In this role you will: 

• Design, build, and maintain robust data pipelines for both batch and real-time streaming use cases 
• 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 
• Optimize ETL workflows for performance, scalability, and fault tolerance 
• Build and support event-driven architectures and scalable platform components 
• Contribute to the orchestration and automation of workflows (e.g., Airflow, dbt) 
• Work on feature pipelines and model-ready data to support ML engineers 
• Promote high standards in code quality, testing, and platform observability 
• Participate in Agile ceremonies and foster a collaborative, growth-oriented team culture 

What you'll need: 

• 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 
• Experience with streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, Spark Streaming) 
• Familiarity with event-driven and service-oriented architecture 
• Hands-on experience with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery) 
• Proficiency with workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, dbt, Prefect) 
• Comfort working both independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced Agile environment 

Bonus points for: 

• Experience with BI tools like Power BI or Tableau 
• Exposure to ML pipelines, feature engineering, or experimentation platforms (e.g., Weights & Biases) 
• Experience in fintech, trading, or derivatives 

Compensation: 

The base salary for this role will be $160,000.00 USD. In addition, this position will also receive an annual target bonus of 12%. Bonus pay at NinjaTrader is based on individual performance (50%) as well as company/team performance (50%). 

Salary and bonus earnings are only two components of the total compensation package offered by NinjaTrader. NinjaTrader offers a 401K plan through ADP under which the company will match up to 3.5% of employee contributions. Annual paid time off allowance accrues at a rate of 18 days per year (some positions may qualify for more) plus seven paid holidays. 

Location: 

This role is based in Chicago, IL. *There may be remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. 

Hybrid: 

For Chicago-based employees, we follow a hybrid work schedule: In-office Tuesday through Thursday, with remote work on Mondays and Fridays. In addition to these weekly remote days, we offer: 20 additional flex remote days annually