Lead Software Engineer – Quant Trading Pod
We are partnering with a newly established, high‑performance quantitative trading pod seeking an entrepreneurial Lead Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale the core trading technology from the ground up. This is a rare greenfield opportunity to own the full stack for a global, systematic equities trading platform while working directly with an experienced Senior Portfolio Manager.
This role sits at the intersection of technology, quantitative research, and live trading, offering significant autonomy, strategic influence, and the chance to shape a best‑in‑class systematic trading infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Architect and maintain the pod’s full trading system, covering:
- Market data ingestion
- Signal/alpha generation
- Research frameworks & backtesting
- Execution & order routing
- Real‑time risk management
- Define tech stack choices, performance optimisation approaches, system design, and scalability requirements.
- Ensure the platform supports low‑latency, high‑throughput, fault‑tolerant trading across global markets.
Team Leadership & Cross‑Functional Collaboration
- Help recruit and lead a small team of developers (and occasionally quant researchers).
- Work closely with quants and the Senior PM to convert research requirements into clean, robust production code.
- Mentor junior developers and guide best practices in system design, coding standards, and documentation.
Strategy Enablement
- Build and maintain:
- Research infrastructure
- Simulation frameworks
- Backtesting engines
- Feature stores
- Convert research prototypes (frequently in Python) into production‑grade C++ or C# code where low‑latency execution is required.
Execution Systems & Trading Infrastructure
- Optimise order execution systems and integrate with exchanges or broker APIs.
- Implement real‑time monitoring, alerting, logging, and automated risk checks.
- Ensure robust handling of live trading, including edge‑case failure scenarios.
Data Engineering & Management
- Own the pipeline for ingesting, cleaning, normalising, and storing structured and alternative datasets.
- Maintain high data integrity and ensure fast, reliable access for both trading and research workloads.
DevOps, Reliability, and Compliance
- Oversee deployment pipelines, version control, and production support practices.
- Guarantee high availability, rapid recovery, and safe rollouts.
- Ensure adherence to security, compliance, and documentation standards.
- Conduct rigorous testing, debugging, and validation of all software components.
Required Technical Skills
- First‑class Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, or related quantitative disciplines.
- Strong fluency in C++ or C# for latency‑sensitive and performance‑critical systems.
- Proficient in Python for research integration, scripting, and data tooling.
- Strong grasp of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and multithreading.
- Good working knowledge of SQL, column stores, time‑series databases.
- Familiarity with engineering best practices: Git, unit testing, CI/CD, monitoring, observability, and logging.
- Strong debugging skills across distributed systems.
Required Experience
- 3+ years designing, building, and maintaining high‑performance trading systems — ideally in systematic equities or quant trading.
- Hands‑on experience with:
- Large‑scale market data pipelines (normalisation, feed handling, replay systems)
- Order routing, exchange connectivity, FIX, and DMA
- Event‑driven architectures and real‑time distributed systems
- Diagnosing and resolving performance bottlenecks in live trading environments
Highly Valued Attributes
- Excellent communication skills and an ability to translate technical and research requirements seamlessly across engineering and trading teams.
- Demonstrated ownership, initiative, and autonomy.
- Comfortable operating in a fast‑paced, iterative environment where priorities shift with market conditions.
- Curious, detail‑oriented, and motivated to build a world‑class greenfield trading platform.