Senior Production Engineer at Optimal

Position: Senior Production Engineer
Company: Optimal Market Technologies, LLC
Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid)
Salary: $150,000 - $225,000 base salary + discretionary bonus (commensurate with experience)

Position Overview:

We are seeking a Senior Production Engineer to own the support, investigation and configuration function for our high-performance options trading platform. The role is deliberately broad: it runs from major improvements to platform reliability and automation, through investigations and configuration, down to the reactive day-to-day tasks that keep clients trading. You will own all of it, build the user-facing tools, reports and dashboards that make the platform easier to run, and use automation to steadily shrink the reactive workload for the whole team.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Support and investigation:
  • Own the support and escalation path for the trading platform, with same-day acknowledgment and a named owner on every issue.
  • Provide daily support coverage from 7:30am Eastern through market close and end-of-day processing.
  • Investigate production issues through to root cause, across our technology stack.
  • Work directly with clients, PMMs, exchanges, and brokers to troubleshoot and answer technical questions.
• Configuration:
  • Own platform configuration: client onboarding setup, FIX sessions, environments, and reference data.
  • Make configuration changes safe, repeatable, and documented.
• Build and automate:
  • Build user-facing features such as GUIs, reports, and dashboards that support trading, operations, and clients.
  • Turn recurring investigations into automation, self-service tools, and runbooks; a shrinking reactive workload is a core measure of success in this role.
  • Improve the team's tooling, scripts, and operational workflows as you go.
• AI and productivity:
  • Use AI-assisted development and investigation tools fluently, ideally Claude Code.
  • Advance how the team applies AI to support, investigation, and configuration work.

What We're Looking For:

• Hands-on experience in financial trading systems, including Order Management Systems and the FIX Protocol.
• 3+ years of professional experience in a production engineering or software engineering role, including time spent writing production code or automation.
• Strong practical Python; able to read and debug C++.
• Deep experience supporting Linux-based applications: logs, tracing, debugging, performance analysis.
• SQL, ideally PostgreSQL.
• Fluent, demonstrated use of AI-assisted tools in real production or development workflows.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills; comfortable working directly with clients and counterparties.
• A bias toward fixing the cause, not just the symptom, and automating so the same issue doesn't come back.