Staff Engineer, Data Platform - Proprietary Trading Firm - $200K - $275K

One of Chicago's biggest names in trading wants you to own and shape the data platform that powers the whole firm. This is a Staff Engineer role at a proprietary trading firm that has been around for roughly 30 years and helped define what this industry looks like today. In this role, you are designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed data systems across the organization. You are building managed platform services that other engineering teams rely on, owning everything from provisioning and upgrades through to reliability and ongoing support. You are working directly with those teams, pulling their feedback into your roadmap decisions and making sure the platform evolves in a way that actually serves them. You bring deep experience with distributed systems trade-offs, batch and stream processing at scale, and technologies like Flink, Spark, ClickHouse, Kafka, and Iceberg. You are strong in Java and Python, comfortable with data modeling and schema governance, and familiar with cloud-native infrastructure including Kubernetes. You can communicate a technical vision clearly and lead through influence across a globally distributed organization. This is a role where your judgment shapes the platform, not just the code. Ready to build something that matters at a firm that has been getting it right for three decades? Get in touch. No up-to-date CV required.