Staff Engineer, Data Platform

About the role

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.

Our Unified Platform (UP) organization builds and offers managed data services, shared infrastructure, and metadata management systems that underpin our common query layer and power batch and streaming pipelines that power teams across DRW.

As a Staff Engineer focused on the Data Platform, you will bring experience scaling data platforms to shape and uphold DRW’s long-term data platform vision, translating data strategy into engineering products and managed services used by Traders, Quantitative Researchers, and Back-Office personnel. You will work across tooling, producer, and consumer teams to connect business priorities with technical direction and hands-on delivery. This is an individual contributor role combining strategic thinking, architectural leadership, software development, and mentorship, with responsibility for technical initiatives that span teams.

Key Responsibilities

- Contribute to and uphold the overall vision for DRW’s Data Platform, guiding its architecture and evolution to advance the firm’s data strategy.

- Work with engineering leads, product managers, and stakeholders to understand business priorities and translate data strategy into engineering products, platform capabilities, and contribute to the sequenced technical roadmap.

- Design, guide, and build managed platform services for data storage, distributed query execution, batch and streaming processing, and workload orchestration, owning their lifecycle from provisioning and upgrades through production support, refining the managed offers from direct user feedback.

- Lead delivery across team boundaries, turning ambiguous requirements into practical designs and measurable outcomes while balancing immediate business needs with long-term platform goals.

- Drive architecture reviews and technology decisions, documenting trade-offs and building consensus around patterns that uphold the platform vision across the data ecosystem.

- Own the strategy for large-scale data governance and build platform capabilities for metadata management, discovery, lineage, schema evolution, and data quality. Partner with security and data stakeholders on access controls and usage tracking.