Staff Product Data Analyst, Fraud & Surveillance

What you'll do:

NinjaTrader's Trade Surveillance team is being built to protect the integrity of our markets and our partners' programs by catching fraud and abuse before it costs anyone money. As a Staff Product Data Analyst, you'll own building and maintaining the in-house detection layer — the models and rules that flag wash trading, collusion, and eval/prop-firm fraud across our trading data — and the partner-facing surveillance reports built on top of them. Engineering builds the data pipeline; you define what runs through it, applying market-structure judgment to turn raw fills into defensible fraud findings that partners and leadership can act on.

In this role you will:

• Own and evolve the detection models and rules that flag market abuse — wash trading, hedging and reverse trading, collusion and coordinated accounts — across our trading data
• Own partner-facing surveillance reporting end to end, starting with standardized end-of-day reports and evolving toward real-time monitoring
• Work directly with eval and prop-firm partners to validate true and false positives, calibrate detection quality, and tune thresholds and rules
• Collaborate with partners on custom reporting and solution feasibility for partner requests
• Translate fraud patterns into precise, tunable detection logic across matching criteria, hold-time thresholds, recurrence windows, and P&L severity scoring
• Maintain data quality and hygiene across the surveillance data that feeds detection and reporting
• Investigate flagged cases end to end and produce clear, evidence-backed findings that partners and internal leadership can act on
• Reduce false positives continuously and surface new fraud patterns as bad actors adapt

What you'll need:

• Deep trade-surveillance or market-risk experience, including hands-on knowledge of market-abuse patterns such as wash trading, hedging, reverse trading, collusion, and copy trading, and how each can produce benign-looking lookalikes
• Working knowledge of futures/derivatives trading mechanics — fills, positions, and P&L — and what abusive trading looks like in practice
• Strong SQL and hands-on experience with a cloud data warehouse (BigQuery and Athena preferred), and comfort investigating large, messy transactional data
• Proven ability to design detection rules or anomaly models and defend them analytically — including precision/recall tradeoffs, thresholds, and validation — with domain judgment leading the analysis
• 10+ years in data analytics or data science, ideally in trading, fraud, risk, fintech, or market surveillance
• Ability to maintain data quality and turn technical findings into clear, concise reporting for partners and executives

Bonus Points for:

• Master's degree in analytics or a related quantitative field
• Prior prop-firm or brokerage experience
• Python or experience with fraud, AML, or surveillance tooling
• Experience building toward real-time or streaming detection

Compensation:
The salary range for this role will be $162,000.00 - $212,000.00 USD. In addition, this position will also receive an annual target bonus of 12%. Bonus pay at NinjaTrader is based on individual performance (50%) as well as company/team performance (50%).

Salary and bonus earnings are only two components of the total compensation package offered by NinjaTrader. NinjaTrader offers a 401(k) plan through ADP under which the company will match up to 3.5% of employee contributions. Annual paid time off allowance accrues at a rate of 23 days per year plus seven paid holidays.

Location:

This role is based in Chicago, IL. *There may be remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, Wisconsin.

Hybrid:

For Chicago-based employees, we follow a hybrid work schedule: In-office Tuesday through Thursday, with remote work on Mondays and Fridays. In addition to these weekly remote days, we offer:

• 20 additional flex remote days annually
• 6 Company Wide Office-Optional weeks tied to major holidays