Software Engineering Manager

*Role is 4 days a week on site in Chicago, IL*The client is a regulated clearinghouse. We clear the event contracts and prediction markets listed on the client’s exchanges, and we are building toward tokenized collateral, 24x7 operation, and the infrastructure that carries traditional finance onto DeFi rails.CCUS Software Engineering is a high trust environment. Failure leads to inquiry rather than blame. Working across team boundaries is expected rather than tolerated. We solve the problem, then we write the code. Design documents and architecture decision records come first. The engineers we value most close their feedback loop. They write tests, and they instrument what they ship so it fails fast, explains itself in production, leaves an audit trail and rolls back cleanly.The Engineering Manager leads the software engineers who build our clearing systems. You would lead an existing team, help shape the larger one it becomes, and how the work is divided. The systems your teams own are what let client list and clear new products, so delivery dates here move business dates. We expect our managers to carry real domain knowledge in clearing and to stay close to system design.Your responsibilities will be:Leading and growing a team of software engineers, including performance management and hiring.Minimizing cognitive load on your team leads and engineers so their attention stays on solving domain problems in code.Partnering with the quality engineering organization, which owns QA and test engineering, on shared delivery goals.Applying domain knowledge of clearing and post-trade processing to guide design decisions rather than delegating them.Aligning the roadmap with product management against real delivery capacity.Reducing friction between your engineers and the product, operations and partner teams they depend on.Shaping team boundaries and ownership so the organization produces the architecture we intend, applying Conway's law deliberately rather than inheriting its side effects.Owning the architecture decision records for your teams' services and keeping them current as designs change.Ensuring code review practices and coding standards are enforced consistently across teams.Improving deployment frequency, change lead time, change failure rate and time to restore service.Running the on-call and production support model for your teams' services.Required:Owning delivery across the full software lifecycle, from design and code review standards through production supportExperience managing software engineers, including direct performance management and hiringA record of making the people around you better, with specific engineers you can point toDelivering complex work on a date that matteredPartnering with product management on roadmap, scope and sequencingWorking knowledge of clearing, post-trade processing or capital marketsArchitecture judgment and a written-first working style, with the depth to guide a design, challenge a proposal, and author the decision records behind bothPreferred:Experience establishing code review practices and coding standards across more than one teamHands-on development depth in JavaShaping team boundaries to get the architecture you want rather than the one the org chart hands youDesigning developer tooling and measuring delivery health with metrics such as change lead time and change failure rateA habit of hiring for range rather than for a single language, since Java is our stack choice but we hire polyglotsNice to have:The FIX messaging protocolCloud platforms including AWS, Azure or GCPJVM languages such as Clojure, Scala or KotlinCurrent technology stack:Java on Kubernetes. Application code and CI pipelines live in GitHub with GitHub Actions. Container images and build artifacts live in registries such as Harbor and Artifactory, and Helm charts are deployed by ArgoCD from a GitOps repository. PostgreSQL, Kafka and Linux. This is representative rather than exhaustive.You do not need experience with every technology in our environment. We hire for competencies over pedigree, so if you have built similar systems and learn quickly, we encourage you to apply.Minimum Work Experience: 10+ years in engineering, with 3+ years managing engineersMinimum Education: Bachelor's in Computer Science or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience