Software Engineer, Production Platform

Aquatic was founded with a shared passion for tackling some of the most complex challenges in one of the world’s most competitive arenas—global financial markets. From the very beginning, we have been driven by a deep commitment to applying cutting-edge scientific research and technological innovation to deliver unparalleled performance. Our journey is one of continuous growth and exploration, marked by a spirit of curiosity and relentless drive for excellence.

At Aquatic, we are actively recruiting for a Software Engineer to join our Engineering team in Chicago. We are investing in the production platform that carries our research and trading systems into live markets, and we are doing it while the firm expands globally. This role sits at the center of that effort: building the deployment, build, and observability systems the rest of the firm runs on, and owning how well they behave in production.

You will collaborate with researchers and engineers across Research, Execution, and Trading Operations. The work is hands-on, high-leverage, and visible: when the platform is good, everyone at the firm ships faster and sleeps better.

Role Details

• Ownership of the platform that moves code, models, and data from development into global live trading, with automated dependency resolution and safe, repeatable deployments.

• Own build and release tooling, including build pinning and approval, promotion workflows, and rollback paths that let engineers ship into production with confidence.

• Extend deployment orchestration and scheduling infrastructure across regions as we enter new markets, with regional parity as the default rather than the exception.

• Build observability into deployments and production services so engineers, researchers, and operations can see what is running, what changed, and what broke.

• Partner with Research and Trading Operations to replace manual operational processes with automation, eliminating toil at the source.

• Improve the reliability and operability of production systems: alerting, failure handling, fallback, and recovery.

• Set and hold engineering standards for the platform. Clean, maintainable Python, tested and documented, built to be supported by people who did not write it.

Technical Experience

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 4+ years of professional software development experience. We are open to a range of experience levels for the right engineer.

• Strong python and familiarity with Java and C++ and a track record of building production-grade systems.

• Experience building and operating distributed systems, deployment pipelines, or internal developer platforms.