Sr. Engineering Manager, Full Stack - NinjaTrader Arena

What you'll do:

NinjaTrader Arena is our simulated futures trading competition platform and a core growth engine for the company. Arena introduces new traders to futures markets through structured, time-boxed competitions powered by live market data and simulated accounts. It is designed to attract and engage a new generation of retail traders and expand NinjaTrader’s reach beyond our traditional customer base.

The Arena team is iterating rapidly on competition formats, engagement mechanics, real-time leaderboards, and growth loops. The platform must support bursty, marketing-driven traffic patterns and real-time competition dynamics while maintaining clear architectural separation from NinjaTrader’s core trading systems. Arena is a dedicated vertical with its own product and engineering leadership, focused explicitly on user acquisition and growth.

We are hiring a Sr. Engineering Manager to lead Arena engineering. You will build and scale the Arena engineering team, define its technical strategy, and partner closely with Product and Design to shape the future of the platform. In the near term, this means leading a high-velocity squad focused on rapid experimentation and architectural flexibility. Longer term, as Arena achieves product-market fit and scales, this role is expected to evolve into multi-team leadership, shaping the organization, architecture, and operating model of a standalone growth business within NinjaTrader.

In this role you will:

• Build and lead the founding Arena engineering team, hiring high-caliber full-stack engineers and establishing a culture optimized for ownership, speed, and technical rigor
• Partner deeply with Product and Design as the engineering co-owner of the Arena growth strategy, shaping experimentation velocity, competition mechanics, and platform evolution during product-market fit discovery
• Define and evolve Arena’s technical architecture, ensuring rapid iteration today while preserving clean boundaries and extensibility for future scale
• Design systems that handle bursty, marketing-driven traffic patterns, real-time competition state, and leaderboard updates without compromising reliability or coupling risk to NinjaTrader’s core trading infrastructure
• Enforce engineering standards for reliability, observability, deployment automation, and operational readiness on Google Cloud Platform, including defining service-level expectations for Arena as an independent vertical
• Own Arena’s engineering execution end-to-end, balancing experimentation speed with long-term system health and technical leverage
• Design the team’s future organizational shape, identifying when to introduce additional squads and technical leadership as Arena scales post product-market fit
• Hire and develop future technical leaders within Arena, building the senior density required to support multi-team growth
• Participate in on-call and incident response as an engineering leader, modeling operational accountability and ensuring systems are built for operators as well as developers
• Represent Arena engineering strategy in cross-functional and executive discussions, clearly articulating trade-offs between growth velocity, system resilience, and architectural investment

What you'll need:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in formal engineering management or team lead roles
• Proven experience building and shipping consumer-facing web products across the full stack (frontend and backend)
• Strong technical fluency in modern web technologies, particularly Node.js and TypeScript on the backend, React on the frontend, and cloud-native architectures
• Hands-on understanding of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and infrastructure-as-code practices in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Experience with relational database design and optimization (PostgreSQL, MySQL), including schema design, query performance tuning, indexing strategies, and data modeling for high-throughput applications
• Strong understanding of observability practices, including monitoring, logging, alerting, and debugging production systems, with experience establishing observability standards and tooling for engineering teams
• Demonstrated experience designing systems for bursty, high-concurrency traffic, including auto-scaling strategies, queue-based architectures, event-driven systems, and load management for tens of thousands of simultaneous users
• Track record of building engineering teams from scratch or near-scratch, including hiring, onboarding, and establishing team culture and processes
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to partner closely with Product, Design, Marketing, and Data stakeholders to shape product direction and go-to-market strategy
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical audiences and align engineering execution with business priorities

Bonus Points for:

• Experience in fintech, trading platforms, or capital markets
• Experience building gamified, competition-driven, or event-based consumer products (e.g., fantasy sports, e-sports platforms, contest systems)
• Background in platforms that handle viral or campaign-driven traffic spikes (e.g., product launches, live events, limited-time promotions)
• Experience with real-time or near-real-time data systems (WebSockets, streaming APIs, pub/sub architectures, leaderboard systems)
• Familiarity with order management systems (OMS) or trade execution engines
• Experience delivering cross-platform products across web, mobile, and desktop
• Passion for democratizing access to financial markets and empowering retail traders

Compensation:

The salary range for this role will be $180,000.00 - $230,000.00 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. *There may be remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, Wisconsin.

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