Role: Python Quartz Developer

Location: Jersey City, NJ

Contract 1 Year

Client Bank of America

We can accept visa transfer too

What this team actually does
This team builds and maintains mission-critical trade surveillance and compliance applications, making sure full-time employees and contractors at the bank aren't insider trading or manipulating the market, for example, someone putting in a large order on inside information to create the appearance of demand, then pulling the order before it settles. It's regulator-facing work, everything has to hold up under audit with clean, traceable data.

What the role actually is
A hands-on Senior Python Developer who writes and owns business logic, not someone who orchestrates data pipelines. This is the single most important distinction the team screens for. The team has explicitly passed on strong, technically impressive candidates whose real experience was ETL/pipeline orchestration (Airflow, Spark, Kafka ingestion, data warehousing) rather than writing the actual rules and calculations that decide what happens with the data. If a candidate's strongest stories are about moving and transforming data reliably rather than making decisions in code, they will not pass.

The team is building a rules engine on BofA's internal Quartz platform, translating logic that currently lives in SQL/stored procedures into Python. REST APIs and some ReactJS/full-stack collaboration are part of the work, but they support the business logic, they aren't the core of it.

Required, hard gates

• 5+ years hands-on object-oriented programming
• Proven, production-level Python development, not scripting or automation on the side
• 3+ years as a senior developer supporting front-office applications in banking or financial services
• 3+ years as a quantitative researcher and/or developer, able to analyze complex domain-specific data
• 3+ years REST services, ReactJS, or full-stack development
• Strong experience with both object databases and relational databases
• Solid SDLC, version control, CI/CD understanding

Nice to have, genuinely not gating, confirmed directly by the hiring manager

• Knowledge of Fixed Income, Equity products, and market structures
• Risk and pricing application development experience
• Trade Surveillance, Market Misconduct, Global Markets Compliance exposure
• Quartz platform experience at Bank of America specifically

What has NOT worked in past interviews with this team, screen these out before submitting

• Candidates whose experience is primarily ETL, pipeline orchestration, or data engineering (Airflow, Spark, Snowflake, Kafka ingestion) without hands-on business logic ownership
• Candidates who can describe system architecture but not a specific business rule or calculation they personally wrote
• Purely cloud-native backgrounds with no enterprise or on-prem experience
• Zero exposure to trading, transactional, or financial market data of any kind

Screening questions that consistently separate strong from weak candidates

• Can you point to a specific example where you wrote actual business rules or calculations, not just moved and transformed data?
• Walk me through how you reduced API execution time or optimized a system, with real numbers
• Any experience with orders, executions, or trading data, even adjacent?
• Have you worked in on-prem environments, or is your background purely cloud?
• Do you have PySpark experience, and if so, when did you move from Pandas to Spark and why?