C++ Developer - Trading Platforms at ThinkMarkets in Chicago, IL

ThinkMarkets is a global financial technology company, specializing in providing multi-asset trading solutions to thousands of clients around the world. With our flagship ThinkTrader platform, we make it available for our clients to trade the world 24-hours a day. Our mission is to bridge the gap between traders, investors, and platforms by allowing access to global markets and thousands of products thus providing our clients the ability to trade the world in the palm of their hand. We use the latest technologies to give traders seamless access to our proprietary trading platforms.

As a C++ Developer, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and optimising high-performance trading systems and infrastructure that power our platforms. You will play a key role in building robust, low-latency components that are critical to our clients' trading experience, working closely with quant, product, and infrastructure teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance C++ components for trading platforms and execution infrastructure
• Build and optimise low-latency systems for order routing, market data processing, and trade execution
• Collaborate with quantitative analysts and product teams to implement and refine trading algorithms and strategies
• Develop and maintain connectivity to exchanges, liquidity providers, and market data feeds using industry-standard protocols (FIX, WebSocket, REST)
• Write clean, well-documented, and testable code with a focus on reliability and performance in production environments
• Participate in code reviews and contribute to engineering best practices, architecture decisions, and technical documentation
• Monitor, debug, and resolve production issues, ensuring system stability and uptime across trading hours
• Stay current with developments in trading technology, market microstructure, and financial regulations relevant to the platform

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field
• 3–5+ years of professional C++ development experience, ideally within fintech, trading systems, or financial services
• Strong command of modern C++ (C++17/20), including STL, templates, memory management, and concurrency primitives
• Demonstrable experience building low-latency or high-throughput systems with a focus on performance optimisation
• Solid understanding of trading market fundamentals including order types, market microstructure, trade lifecycle, and financial instruments (equities, FX, CFDs, derivatives)
• Familiarity with trading protocols such as FIX, and experience integrating with exchanges or liquidity providers
• Experience with multi-threading, lock-free data structures, and profiling tools (e.g. perf, Valgrind, VTune)
• Proficiency with Linux/Unix environments, build systems (CMake, Make), and version control (Git)
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to diagnose and resolve complex system-level issues under pressure
• Experience in algorithmic trading, market data systems, or execution management systems (EMS) is highly desirable