Senior Software Engineer – Low Latency; Core Java

Job Title and Location

Senior Software Engineer – Low Latency (Core Java)

Location: Chicago, IL – Hybrid (Candidates must be local and willing to work onsite 2 days per week)

Duration & Type: 6‑Month Contract (Potential for Extension)

Compensation & Benefits: Competitive W2 hourly rate ($70‑77/hr), Access to Healthcare, Dental, and Vision Insurance Plan of Choice, and 401K

Chamberlain Advisors is seeking a Senior Software Engineer – Low Latency (Core Java) for a direct client in the financial services industry. The consultant will join a specialized engineering team supporting a mission‑critical electronic trading platform that processes thousands of market‑data updates, quotes, and trade events every second.

This is not a traditional backend Java development role. The ideal candidate will possess deep expertise in Core Java, low‑latency systems, concurrent programming, JVM optimization, Linux performance engineering, and production support.

Responsibilities include maintaining and optimizing an existing enterprise platform and helping modernize development workflows through AI‑powered software engineering tools such as Google’s Gemini ecosystem.

• Support and enhance a mission‑critical low‑latency electronic trading platform that processes high‑volume streaming market data and trading activity.
• Maintain and optimize an established Core Java codebase consisting of complex business workflows and numerous application modules developed over several years.
• Analyze existing application architecture and quickly understand business workflows to diagnose and resolve production issues.
• Optimize application performance by reducing latency, increasing throughput, and improving CPU and memory utilization.
• Design, develop, and optimize highly efficient Java components with a focus on concurrency, scalability, and system reliability.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues through root‑cause analysis, performance profiling, debugging, and system diagnostics.
• Perform dependency upgrades, library maintenance, and technical debt remediation while ensuring backward compatibility across the platform.
• Participate in architecture discussions and recommend improvements that balance performance, maintainability, fault tolerance, scalability, and reliability.
• Develop new feature enhancements while supporting ongoing platform modernization initiatives.
• Utilize AI‑assisted development tools, including Gemini CLI, Gemini ADK, AI agents, and similar technologies, to improve developer productivity, accelerate code analysis, automate workflows, and assist with bug investigation.
• Support software deployments and production releases while ensuring system stability and operational excellence.
• Collaborate closely with engineering leadership and cross‑functional teams to continuously improve platform performance and developer efficiency.

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Economics, Mathematics, or a related field preferred
• Minimum of 5 years of professional Core Java development experience in enterprise software environments.
• Demonstrated experience building, maintaining, or supporting low‑latency, high‑performance, or high‑throughput applications.
• Strong understanding of Core Java and advanced object‑oriented programming principles.
• Deep expertise in multi‑threading, concurrent programming, lock‑free programming, thread synchronization, thread pools, concurrent collections, and shared memory concepts.
• Strong knowledge of JVM internals, including Garbage Collection optimization, Object pooling, Memory allocation, Primitive specialization, Performance tuning.
• Experience evaluating algorithms and data structures for execution speed, scalability, and efficiency.
• Advanced knowledge of Linux operating systems, operating system behavior, hardware utilization, CPU scheduling, and thread management.
• Experience optimizing applications through performance profiling, micro‑benchmarking, JVM profiling.
• Experience with JProfiler or similar profiling tools.
• Strong troubleshooting and production support experience, including Root Cause Analysis (RCA), performance investigation, log analysis, debugging, incident…