Engineering Manager, Backend

What you'll do:

We’re looking for a seasoned engineering leader to build and scale our FCM Operations engineering squad at NinjaTrader. This is a hands-on leadership role with broad scope—owning the strategy, execution, and team growth behind the systems that power our brokerage operations backbone. Your squad owns the critical workflows that keep our FCM running: customer onboarding and identity verification (CIP/KYC/AML), treasury and money movement services, account lifecycle management, tax certification (W8/W9), regulatory data retention, and the cross-system process improvements that make internal teams across Accounts, Treasury, FinOps, and Compliance more efficient every day.

As a leader in our technology organization, your team’s work will directly impact how NinjaTrader serves customers from their first account application through every funding, withdrawal, and compliance touchpoint across the account lifecycle. You will partner closely with compliance, new accounts, brokerage operations, treasury, and finance stakeholders to deliver solutions that balance operational efficiency, regulatory rigor, and customer experience while championing the use of AI and automation to modernize workflows that have traditionally been manual and labor-intensive.

In this role you will:

• Lead, mentor, and manage a growing team of engineers in a regulated financial environment
• Assume an active role in the career development of direct reports with regular 1:1s, coaching, and performance feedback—building a team that understands both the engineering craft and the operational realities of running an FCM
• Own the execution of the FCM Operations roadmap in partnership with Product, Compliance, and Brokerage Operations, ensuring alignment with technical strategy, regulatory requirements, and team capacity
• Drive the modernization of customer onboarding systems including CIP service integrations, new account application review workflows, and KYC/AML verification processes—moving from manual review toward intelligent, automated decision pipelines
• Lead the development of self-service account maintenance tools for end users and internal process enhancements for post-account-creation support, reducing operational burden on brokerage teams
• Champion the use of AI to optimize operational workflows—identifying opportunities where intelligent automation can reduce manual review, accelerate processing times, and improve accuracy across onboarding, compliance screening, and account operations
• Ensure W8/W9 tax certification and IRS reporting processes are reliable, accurate, and automated where possible
• Own data retention and hygiene strategies, ensuring data alignment and consistency across multiple systems—critical for regulatory compliance, audit readiness, and operational integrity
• Guide and actively shape architectural decisions with Senior+ engineers, review code as needed, and ensure cloud-native best practices for all new development on GCP/Kubernetes
• Oversee release processes and CI/CD workflows, ensuring smooth deployments with appropriate change management controls for regulated systems
• Participate in our engineering on-call rotation as a manager and uphold engineering quality and execution standards, including code reviews, test coverage, release pipelines, observability, and incident response
• Hire top-tier engineering talent and contribute to the evolution of our engineering organization as we scale

What you'll need:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in engineering leadership roles managing engineers directly
• Demonstrated experience in financial services, brokerage, or fintech with practical understanding of KYC/AML processes, money movement systems, and the regulatory obligations of operating a brokerage or FCM
• Proven experience delivering production-grade systems in cloud environments (GCP or AWS) with modern deployment practices
• Track record of partnering cross-functionally with compliance, operations, finance, and product stakeholders to deliver technology solutions in regulated environments
• Genuine enthusiasm for applying AI and automation to modernize operational workflows—you see manual compliance and operations processes as engineering problems waiting to be solved
• Demonstrated ability to lead teams through growth, ambiguity, and change—comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and iterating quickly
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to align technical execution with business priorities and translate between engineering, compliance, and operations teams
• Strong collaborative skills—you build trust naturally with both engineers and business stakeholders
• Operates with a strong sense of ownership and accountability

Bonus points for:

• Direct experience at a futures commission merchant (FCM), clearing firm, or broker-dealer operating under CFTC/NFA or SEC/FINRA regulatory frameworks
• Familiarity with CIP/KYC/AML vendor integrations and identity verification service providers
• Background in building internal tooling and self-service platforms that improve operational efficiency at scale
• Familiarity with Node.js, TypeScript, React, Python, C++, Java, or Scala in production environments

Compensation:

The salary range for this role will be $160,000.00 - $210,000.00 USD. In addition, this position will also receive an annual target bonus of 15%. Bonus pay at NinjaTrader is based on individual performance (50%) as well as company/team performance (50%).

Salary and bonus earnings are only two components of the total compensation package offered by NinjaTrader. NinjaTrader offers a 401K plan through ADP under which the company will match up to 3.5% of employee contributions. Annual paid time off allowance accrues at a rate of 23 days per year (some positions may qualify for more) plus seven paid holidays.

Location:

This role is based in Chicago, IL. We are not open to remote candidates for this role

Hybrid:

For Chicago-based employees, we follow a hybrid work schedule: In-office Tuesday through Thursday, with remote work on Mondays and Fridays. In addition to these weekly remote days, we offer:

• 20 additional flex remote days annually
• 5 Company Wide Office-Optional weeks tied to major holidays