Sr. Software Engineer AI

What you'll do:

NinjaTrader is investing heavily in AI — not as a product feature but as a force multiplier across the entire company. We’re hiring an internal forward-deployed AI Engineer to accelerate the adoption of agentic AI across Engineering Operations Customer Experience Data Finance and beyond. You’ll own AI infrastructure that serves every team in the company — we expect the work you build in your first year to save thousands of hours annually via 50+ new AI agents.

You’ll embed with internal teams find the highest-leverage automation opportunities and own them end-to-end: discovery simplification build deployment and adoption. You’ll scope a problem with a non-technical stakeholder in the morning and ship production infrastructure in the afternoon. You measure your work in hours unlocked and cycle time reduced — not stories closed.

In this role you will:

• Design and build multi-step agentic workflows in Python and TypeScript — planning loops tool dispatch error recovery and explicit human-in-the-loop checkpoints for high-stakes decisions
• Develop production LLM applications on Anthropic and OpenAI SDKs including prompt engineering structured outputs tool/function calling prompt caching and batch processing
• Build and maintain RAG pipelines — embedding generation vector/hybrid search knowledge base ingestion — and apply judgment about when retrieval actually helps versus adds noise
• Own eval discipline end-to-end: define offline eval sets run A/B experiments on model changes build regression suites and articulate “good enough” exit criteria using LangSmith Braintrust or equivalent
• Drive cost and latency optimization — token budgets model tier selection (Haiku / Sonnet / Opus and GPT equivalents) and caching strategies that hold up at scale
• Build MCP servers and function-calling connectors that give agents reliable schema-governed access to internal tools APIs and data sources — Jira CRM Slack internal services and more
• Implement and maintain production integrations using REST GraphQL webhooks and event-driven patterns (queues Pub/Sub) with proper idempotency retry logic and backfill support
• Wire up OAuth/SAML authentication flows (Okta in particular) for secure agent-to-service access across internal and third-party systems
• Own cloud infrastructure for AI workloads on GCP using Terraform GKE/Cloud Run and secrets management — with logging metrics and alerting from day one
• Build data pipelines that feed AI systems: strong SQL Athena/BigQuery-class warehouses ETL/ELT schema design and data-quality monitoring
• Partner with internal teams across Engineering Operations Customer Support Data and Finance to identify where agentic automation can have the highest leverage — then build it
• Create reusable libraries SDKs and internal tooling so teams can extend AI capabilities without starting from scratch
• Act as a technical advisor and embedded engineer translating ambiguous business problems into well-scoped AI systems with clear success metrics
• Instrument and monitor deployed agents in production — you’re on-call for what you ship and you treat reliability as a feature

What you'll need:

• 5+ years of production software engineering experience primarily in Python or TypeScript. Go is a plus
• Production LLM application experience with Anthropic or OpenAI SDKs — agents structured outputs tool use RAG evals batch processing — shipped not demoed
• Forward-deployed instinct: engineering developer relations or solutions engineering experience
• Strong evaluation discipline with the ability to define and defend exit criteria using LangSmith Braintrust or equivalent tools
• Experience building multi-step tool-using agents with planning error recovery and human-in-the-loop design in production environments
• Experience with RAG pipelines embeddings hybrid search and the judgment to determine when retrieval improves outcomes
• Experience building MCP servers function-calling schemas and sandboxed execution environments
• Strong understanding of token budgets model tier trade-offs and AI cost/latency optimization strategies
• Experience integrating REST APIs GraphQL webhooks OAuth/SAML authentication (especially Okta) and event-driven architectures
• Cloud-native engineering experience with GCP or AWS including Terraform containers secrets management logging metrics and alerting
• Strong SQL and data engineering experience with modern warehouses ETL/ELT pipelines schema design and data-quality monitoring
• Ability to work cross-functionally and translate ambiguous business problems into production-ready AI systems
• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Bonus points for:

• Trading industry fintech or capital markets experience
• Futures trading knowledge
• Experience with LangChain LlamaIndex or similar orchestration frameworks
• Familiarity with observability tooling such as OpenTelemetry Prometheus and Grafana
• Contributions to open-source AI or developer tooling projects

Compensation:

The salary range for this role will be $125000.00 - $175000.00 USD. In addition this position will also receive an annual target bonus of 12%. 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 18 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

What We Do

More than 2 million futures traders trust NinjaTrader's award-winning software and brokerage services to help them trade smarter. Since 2003 we've been building better futures for all traders by making futures trading more accessible scalable and user-friendly. As a bold innovative thought leader in the trading space we build products and services that empower active futures traders to easily analyze and react to data from the world's leading financial markets. Veteran and new futures traders alike look to us for our always-on support daily free education and analysis access to developer apps and much more. We believe in the power of innovation to drive futures trading forward. Together we continue to redefine what's possible in trading advocate for our customers and provide the best tools support and experiences to the fast-growing retail futures trading community. Located in Chicago our entrepreneurial employee-centric culture is inspiring innovative and inviting. We're committed to diversity equity and inclusivity so our team members feel at ease to be themselves and empowered to deliver the work they do best.

Why Work With Us

Our team members are our #1 asset and the signature ingredient to our success. When you join NinjaTrader you become part of an innovative forward-looking community that encourages creativity collaboration and camaraderie to deliver the best futures trading experience possible to our more than 1.8 million users. See why better futures start here.

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