Software Engineer - Compliance, Inquiry and Audit

DRW is a diversified trading firm with over 3 decades of experience bringing sophisticated technology and exceptional people together to operate in markets around the world. We value autonomy and the ability to quickly pivot to capture opportunities, so we operate using our own capital and trading at our own risk.

Headquartered in Chicago with offices throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, we trade a variety of asset classes including Fixed Income, ETFs, Equities, FX, Commodities and Energy across all major global markets. We have also leveraged our expertise and technology to expand into three non-traditional strategies: real estate, venture capital and cryptoassets.

We operate with respect, curiosity and open minds. The people who thrive here share our belief that it’s not just what we do that matters–it's how we do it. DRW is a place of high expectations, integrity, innovation and a willingness to challenge consensus.

The UP - Compliance team (UP-CMP) provides the technology solution to all the firm’s regulatory reporting and trade surveillance needs. In the context of a highly diversified trading firm, vast volumes of data need to be analysed on a continuous basis, to ensure DRW satisfies all its regulatory obligations.  
 
The team owns a wide variety of data pipelines, each one of them targeted to the specifics of its asset class or trading activity type. These processes consume order events, reference, pricing and risk data from all the trading desks at the firm, as well as many other technology teams within our Unified Platform. With that level of complexity in mind, the software engineers’ mission is to build robust and reliable systems which transform the plethora of information into views and reports the compliance officers use to monitor and inspect all the firms trade activity. 

The Inquiry and Audit (IA) is a sub-stream within UP – Compliance, responsible for tackling all the urgent and high-priority requests across all UP – Compliance systems. It involves audits, data requests and tasks which are not currently part of the existing live systems and can only be met by quick code changes or rapid prototyping.   

The team operates in an ad-hoc mode, where each software engineer picks up the most urgent or the highest priority task to work on. Having a high degree of context switching between projects, it also requires a breath of programming knowledge, which spans, object-oriented JVM languages, functional programming, data processing frameworks and web user interfaces.  

Responsibilities 

• Address ad-hoc and unplanned work requests which involve making code changes, writing custom code, scripting and spinning up small prototypes.  

• Context switch on a regular basis, especially when tasks with higher priority come in. 

• Decision making: the developer is empowered and expected to decide whether they should prioritise new tasks and work on it themselves, or whether it’s better to delegate it to a colleague, who either has got more knowledge of it or bandwidth. Teamwork is essential. 

• Production engineering: once uncovered inefficiencies in the live systems, the IA developers are expected to document, analyse and finally, implement optimisations to eliminate them. 

• Operational excellence: when fixing bugs or optimising the runtime, the developers are expected to appropriately test their changes, as well as focus on the reliability, scalability and maintainability of the project. 

• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills. The candidate needs to be able to dive deep into unknown codebases, follow stracktraces and figure out the root cause.  

• The IA developer is a quick learner who can abstract away the complexity of a project to find what the problem is and be confident to fix it in production.  

• Overall, the candidate needs to be happy to do support every day. When the support is quiet, they need to be proactive, understand the pain points of certain projects, to implement long-term fixes or optimisations with the aim of reducing future support workload. 

• Urgency: the engineers need to troubleshoot production issues as soon as they are detected and resolve them in a timely manner. 

• Ownership: it’s expected to work on a task from start to finish, while providing a clear resolution for each issue. When facing difficulties or blockers, the developer is expected to chase the relevant stakeholder and ask them to provide more information.  

• Excellent communication and collaboration: IA works with a variety of development teams in UP as well as the compliance officers, therefore, effectively relaying information is the key to getting things done in a timely manner.  

 
Desired Experience 

• A minimum of 3 years in the industry as a backend engineer. 

• Strong programming skills: The UP-CMP projects are written in Java, Elixir, Scala and Typescript. While it's not a hard requirement for a candidate to know them all, exposure to both object-oriented and functional programming is needed.  

• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, git, etc. 

• Exposure orchestration tools such as Argo and Airflow. 

• Working knowledge of SQL & Spark. 

• Data Lakehouse implementation experience or working knowledge of underlying concepts. 

 

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