AI Engineer

About the role

Chicago Trading Company (CTC) is a premier proprietary trading firm specializing in options market making. Our collaborative culture fuels innovation in quantitative research, systematic trading strategies, and cutting-edge trading technology. For over three decades CTC has provided critical liquidity across derivatives exchanges worldwide - making them fairer, more transparent, and more efficient.

We strive to be the most innovative firm in the industry today, tomorrow, and long into the future while upholding ethical excellence. We believe that CTC makes a positive impact on the markets, the lives of our employees, and all the communities to which we belong. Started in 1995 by a team of forward-thinking Traders, we are proud to call ourselves an industry leader that keeps making markets and each other better.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Build agent tooling used by CTC's engineers, quants, and traders.

- Bring new models, coding agents, and agent harnesses into CTC as the ecosystem evolves.

- Build the common infrastructure needed to support them, including inference, configuration, integrations, tracing, and access controls.

- Build AI tools and interfaces for specific roles and workflows across the firm.

- Improve the performance and reliability of the systems we run, from shared services to model inference.

- Prototype new uses for agents in areas like research, simulation, and trading.

- Work directly with users to understand their workflows and guide what we build next.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- Experience building software with LLMs and agents, including tools, context, orchestration, and model APIs.

- Familiarity with coding agents and the tradeoffs between different models, providers, and harnesses.

- Comfortable working in Python, C++, and/or Java.

- Experience building software used by other engineers or end users.

- Comfortable working across application code, developer tooling, infrastructure, and user-facing software.

- Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous problems from idea through production.

- Hands-on use of this technology outside of work, including projects or experiments you've built for yourself.

NICE TO HAVE

- Experience with model evaluation or benchmarking.

- Experience with inference optimization, fine-tuning, or post-training.

- Experience in financial markets or trading environments.

- Experience with quantitative research, market data, simulation, or backtesting.

COMPENSATION

The salary range for this role is listed below. This role is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. The discretionary bonus will be dependent upon the individual’s skills, experience, qualifications, and firm performance.

Salary Range

$175,000—$225,000 USD

Most teams at CTC, with the exception of Trading, follow a hybrid workplace model, subject to change based on business need.