AI Engineer
- Salary
- $175,000 - $225,000
- Level
- Mid
Not stated in the posting: work type, visa.
Open. First seen 3 October 2026.
About the role
CTC Lateral - Website & LinkedIn's standard text
Chicago Trading Company (CTC) is a premier proprietary trading firm specializing in options market making. Our collaborative culture fuels innovation in quantitative research, systematic trading strategies, and cutting-edge trading technology. For over three decades CTC has provided critical liquidity across derivatives exchanges worldwide - making them fairer, more transparent, and more efficient.
We strive to be the most innovative firm in the industry today, tomorrow, and long into the future while upholding ethical excellence. We believe that CTC makes a positive impact on the markets, the lives of our employees, and all the communities to which we belong. Started in 1995 by a team of forward-thinking Traders, we are proud to call ourselves an industry leader that keeps making markets and each other better.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Build agent tooling used by CTC's engineers, quants, and traders.
- Bring new models, coding agents, and agent harnesses into CTC as the ecosystem evolves.
- Build the common infrastructure needed to support them, including inference, configuration, integrations, tracing, and access controls.
- Build AI tools and interfaces for specific roles and workflows across the firm.
- Improve the performance and reliability of the systems we run, from shared services to model inference.
- Prototype new uses for agents in areas like research, simulation, and trading.
- Work directly with users to understand their workflows and guide what we build next.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Experience building software with LLMs and agents, including tools, context, orchestration, and model APIs.
- Familiarity with coding agents and the tradeoffs between different models, providers, and harnesses.
- Comfortable working in Python, C++, and/or Java.
- Experience building software used by other engineers or end users.
- Comfortable working across application code, developer tooling, infrastructure, and user-facing software.
- Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous problems from idea through production.
- Hands-on use of this technology outside of work, including projects or experiments you've built for yourself.
NICE TO HAVE
- Experience with model evaluation or benchmarking.
- Experience with inference optimization, fine-tuning, or post-training.
- Experience in financial markets or trading environments.
- Experience with quantitative research, market data, simulation, or backtesting.
Compensation
The salary range for this role is listed below. This role is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. The discretionary bonus will be dependent upon the individual’s skills, experience, qualifications, and firm performance.
Salary Range
$175,000—$225,000 USD
Most teams at CTC, with the exception of Trading, follow a hybrid workplace model, subject to change based on business need.
CTC Lateral - Website & LinkedIn's standard text
Our Benefits
We strongly believe in the well-being of our employees and their families so we offer outstanding benefits to support you both professionally and personally. These benefits include generous time off, insurance coverage, paid parental leave, free breakfast and lunch (plus healthy snacks, of course), wellness reimbursement, and a variety of other benefits focused on providing the best employee experience.
(Disclaimer: interns and contractors are not eligible for benefits at CTC)
CTC Lateral - Website & LinkedIn's standard text
Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
At CTC, we aim to cultivate a workplace that celebrates diversity and each person feels included, engaged and empowered. Where each of us feels we belong. We are committed to having a diverse workforce and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.
CTC does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.
If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or to apply for a position, please contact us at info@chicagotrading.com. Note that emails sent to this email account for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.
Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Information submitted by job applicants may be subject to review and analysis by automated systems, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), as part of the recruitment process. Such systems are utilized to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of our hiring procedures. Applicants are advised that any information provided may be evaluated by AI tools to ensure an equitable and thorough assessment.
What this role asks for
Standard for data science / ML roles
LLM · Python
Common in data science / ML postings at any company.
41% of this description is written for the role. The rest is CTC Lateral - Website & LinkedIn's standard text, folded away below.
Read against CTC Lateral - Website & LinkedIn's other open postings on this site.
The team: Technology
This role is one of 10 open in Technology.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
C++ (7 of 10), Python (7 of 10), Java (3 of 10), Linux (2 of 10), SQL (2 of 10)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Quant Developer - Research Engineering posted Sep 17
- Senior Engineer - Data Ingestion posted Sep 4
- C++ Engineering Lead – Delta One posted Aug 31
- Trade Support Engineer posted Jul 15
- Desk Developer posted Jun 22
- Linux Engineering Team Lead posted Apr 27
- C++ Senior Engineer - Options Market Making Execution posted Mar 19
- Senior FPGA Engineer posted Sep 30
- Experienced Software Engineer - US posted Feb 14
From the team and dates on CTC Lateral - Website & LinkedIn's own job board.
Salary context
47 other open postings titled AI Engineer state a salary: median USD 150,000 to USD 220,000 a year.
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