CME Group

Staff Agentic Software Engineer

CME Group • $125K — $209K *
Chicago, IL 60629In-Person
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Reposted Today
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Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Mathematics, Financial Engineering, or a related field.
  • 8+ years of hands-on Java development experience.
  • Exceptional problem-solving skills and ability to communicate complex technical concepts effectively.
  • Expert-level proficiency in Java, particularly with the Spring framework and REST APIs.
  • Experience with Python for scripting, data analysis, or machine learning.
  • Proven track record designing and debugging multi-threaded concurrent applications.
  • Strong experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services in production environments.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the architecture, design, and development of high-volume, low-latency Java applications on Google Cloud.
  • Translate complex business and functional requirements into scalable solutions.
  • Architect and maintain a robust CI/CD automation pipeline for efficient software delivery.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver cohesive solutions.
  • Mentor junior engineers and lead by example in following agile best practices.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health coverage.
  • Retirement package including a 401(k) and an active pension plan.
  • Education reimbursement provisions.
  • Paid time off and mental health benefits.
  • Broad-based equity program allowing employee ownership.
Full Job Description
This is hybrid (2 days) on site position in our Chicago office.

CME Group is looking for a senior and experienced Staff Agentic Software Engineer to join a dynamic team responsible for our mission-critical Real-time Positions & Risk Management Systems. This role is pivotal in driving both the technical evolution of our financial platforms and the transformation of our engineering workflows.

You will lead the team in transitioning from traditional software development to an agentic engineering paradigm-leveraging advanced LLM coding tools (e.g., Gemini CLI, Antigravity) to build high-performance systems faster, safer, and at greater scale. As a technical leader, you will balance aggressive AI-driven velocity with the strict safety, low-latency, and zero-downtime requirements of CME Group's core clearing and risk management functions.

Principal Responsibilities
  • Lead the architecture, design, and development of high-volume, low-latency Java applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for mission-critical systems, ensuring ultra-high availability, low jitter, and thread safety.
  • Lead the team's shift toward agentic software engineering. Standardize toolchains, system prompts, context repositories, and agentic loops across the development lifecycle.
  • Build and maintain the shared agent infrastructure: repo-level agent context, MCP server integration, codebase indexing pipelines, and local developer tooling that feed deep, domain-specific context into LLM agents.
  • Design dynamic evaluation harnesses, automated test suites, and CI/CD guardrails specifically tailored to audit, test, and validate AI-generated code for concurrency bugs, memory leaks, and performance regressions.
  • Maintain and enhance high-throughput CI/CD automation pipelines to ensure seamless, secure, and reliable software delivery into production.
  • Mentor engineers through the workflow shift; lead hands-on workshops to train traditional software developers into proficient AI-native engineers.

Core Technical Expertise
  • Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Mathematics, Financial Engineering, or a related field, with 8+ years of hands-on experience building, deploying, and maintaining scalable real-time systems across the full stack.
  • Expert-level proficiency in Java and the Spring framework. Deep, hands-on experience designing and debugging multi-threaded concurrent applications, lock-free data structures, memory management, thread pools, and race condition diagnostics.
  • Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g. Gemini CLI, Claude Code, Codex, etc) in real production workflows: multi-step agent tasks, agent-authored PRs, agent-driven test generation.
  • Deep experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services (GKE, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Cloud Run, Dataflow) and real-time messaging frameworks (Kafka, MQ, Flink).
  • Strong proficiency in SQL, Postgres DB, and Python (for scripting, automated evals, data analysis, or tooling integration).
  • Experience with distributed tracing, SLO/SLI monitoring, and chaos engineering in production environments where system failure carries direct financial or regulatory impact.

Agentic Engineering
  • Daily operational fluency with CLI and terminal-based agent environments (Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex) as well as agentic IDEs (Cursor, Antigravity).
  • Direct experience configuring system context, building or integrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, function calling, and structured domain-prompting.
  • Proven track record of designing property-based tests, static analysis rules, and code-review workflows specifically built to catch AI hallucinations, edge-case failures, and security vulnerabilities.
  • Demonstrated ability to establish team-wide AI coding norms, measure developer outcome velocity, and champion an AI-first engineering culture.


Staff-level Expectations
  • Drive architecture decisions across team boundaries and be able to articulate tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and stakeholders.
  • Be able to operate under pressure and on-call for system where failure has direct financial or regulatory input
  • Elevate team capabilities through rigorous code reviews, design reviews, pairing, and active mentorship.
  • Contribute to development tooling and engineering culture initiatives.
  • Drive technical leadership by mentoring the team on agentic AI capabilities, accelerating feature delivery while maintaining strict code quality and reliability.


Desirable Qualifications
  • Experience developing software for financial risk management, high-frequency trading, or clearing systems.
  • Experience building internal developer tools, CLI extensions, or custom LLM evaluation harnesses.
  • Familiarity with local model deployments or fine-tuning workflows for enterprise dev environments.
    #LI-DS2
    #LI-Hybrid


CME Group is committed to offering a competitive total rewards package for our employees that recognizes their contributions to the business and reflects our long-term investment in their future. The pay range for this role is $125,800-$209,600. Actual salary offered will be dependent on a wide array of factors including but not limited to: relevant experience, skills, education and comparison to internal employees (where relevant). Our compensation program also includes an annual target bonus opportunity for all employees, as well as the opportunity to become an owner in the company through our broad-based equity program. Through our benefits program, we strive to offer flexibility, value and choice. From comprehensive health coverage, to a retirement package that includes both a 401(k) and an active pension plan, to highly competitive education reimbursement provisions, paid time off and a mental health benefit, CME Group offers a holistic benefits package for our team and their dependents.

About CME Group

CME Group Inc. is a global markets company. It owns large derivatives, options and futures exchanges in Chicago and New York City using its CME Globex trading platforms. It also owns CME Clearing which provides settlement and clearing of exchange trades. The company offers trading in a wide range of products across various asset classes, including futures and options based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural commodities, and metals. CME Group was formed in 2007 through the merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). The company is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and has offices in New York City, London, Belfast, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Singapore, and Tokyo.
Learn more about CME Group
Size
3,480 employees
Market Cap
$60.2 billion
Industry
Finance & Insurance
Net Income
$2.1 billion
Founded
1848
5 Year Trend
+5.5%
Revenue
$4.8 billion
NASDAQ
CME
* Ladders Estimates

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