Head of Engineering / CTO | Chicago- Algorithmic Trading

A leading HFT / quantitative trading firm is seeking a senior engineering leader to help shape the future of one of its most successful algorithmic trading businesses.

The group has been operating successfully for over 20 years and is considered one of the firm's flagship trading teams. Historically, engineering has evolved in a highly entrepreneurial and fast-moving environment, and the team is now looking for a senior leader to modernise engineering practices, platform maturity, and organisational structure while preserving the performance and agility that made the business successful.

This is a high-impact leadership role focused on engineering excellence, scalability, reliability, and long-term technology strategy across a large, established trading platform.

Importantly, this is not a mandate to reinvent the trading side of the business. The existing leadership team has deep domain expertise and has been with the group since inception. The focus here is bringing external perspective, modern engineering standards, and scalable organisational practices into a highly successful but historically under-structured environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and drive long-term engineering strategy across the trading platform
• Improve engineering maturity, development workflows, tooling, and operational processes
• Lead initiatives around observability, monitoring, reliability, and production stability
• Drive platform scalability and architectural evolution
• Introduce modern software engineering standards and best practices
• Lead AI-enabled engineering initiatives and workflow automation
• Partner closely with trading, research, and infrastructure leadership
• Mentor and scale a high-performing engineering organisation

Ideal Background

Senior engineering leadership experience within trading, big tech, infrastructure, or high-scale startup environments

• Strong track record leading large engineering organisations and driving technical strategy
• Experience modernising complex or legacy systems at scale
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence
• Strong organisational leadership and engineering process mindset
• Experience improving developer productivity, tooling, CI/CD, observability, or platform engineering practices
• Familiarity with modern AI-assisted engineering workflows is highly desirable

The firm is open-minded on industry background and is particularly interested in leaders who can bring mature engineering practices and external perspective into a high-performance trading environment.

Compensation is highly competitive and designed to attract top-tier engineering leadership talent.

Please send your resume to george@oxfordknight.com for more information

Whilst we carefully review all applications, to all jobs, due to the high volume of applications we receive it is not possible to respond to those who have not been successful.

Contact
Please send your resume to george@oxfordknight.com for more information