Senior FPGA Engineer Chicago

CTC is a cutting-edge proprietary trading firm with a long-term vision and a clear focus on helping the world price and manage risk. Our fun and trusting culture inspires us to solve the industry’s most challenging problems and take calculated risks in a collaborative environment.

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.

Are you excited by the idea of applying your hardware development expertise to power ultra-low-latency trading systems? Do you want to explore new architectures that push the limits of performance and help take some of our most sophisticated trading strategies to the next level? If so, we encourage you to read on!

At CTC, we’re looking for a Senior FPGA Engineer to join our FPGA development team to do just that and more. As a member, you'll work closely with other specialists, traders, and quants to design and build the next generation of end-to-end trading systems. While helping craft our development environment and processes, you’ll architect solutions, influence design choices across teams, and see your work translate into real-time impact.

• Partner with a skilled team to define and implement a pragmatic architectural vision with a focus on ultra-low-latency and reliability.
• Collaborate with senior technology leaders to continuously improve our trading platform design.
• Build a deep understanding of trading workflows, quantitative models, and system performance needs while working with a multidisciplinary team.
• Develop an implementation roadmap in partnership with Quant and Trading to deliver incremental improvements in trading performance and long-term architectural innovation.
• Lead design implementation efforts, contribute to team code reviews, and champion best practices around performance, logic, standard methodologies and maintainability issues to ensure code-level consistency and scalability.

• Proven experience and expertise with FPGA development.
• Advanced proficiency using HDLs, with an emphasis on System Verilog or VHDL.
• Comfortable working in Python and/or C++ for developing tools, test benches, and integrations.
• Demonstrated understanding of computer architectures.
• Enthusiasm for applying modern, agile design and testing practices.

• Experience in financial markets or trading environments.
• Knowledge of common networking protocols like TCP/UDP and multicast.

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

$225,000 — $250,000 USD

Most teams at CTC, with the exception of Trading, follow a hybrid workplace model, subject to change based on business need.

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 medical coverage, paid parental leave, free breakfast and lunch (plus healthy snacks, of course), wellness reimbursement, quarterly recharge days, and a variety of other benefits focused on providing the best employee experience.

(Disclaimer: interns and contractors are not eligible for benefits at CTC)

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…