(Senior) Backend Engineer

We're working with a specialist investment technology firm that is building and scaling the technology behind its investment and trading operations.

This is a great opportunity for a strong backend engineer who wants more than just another feature-development role.

You'll work on systems handling real-time market data, portfolio accounting, risk, performance analytics and trading operations - with data flowing directly from major exchanges and financial data providers.

The engineering team is intentionally small, which means you'll have significant ownership and influence. You'll help design systems, make architecture decisions, write production code, deploy what you build, and see your work used by the investment team every day.

What you will do:

• Build backend services supporting portfolio monitoring, accounting, risk and investment operations
• Design reliable APIs and internal services using Python
• Build data pipelines handling high-volume market and trading data
• Integrate with major exchanges and financial data providers through REST and WebSocket APIs
• Work with market data at tick-level granularity
• Build systems that calculate NAV, returns, risk and performance metrics
• Design and evolve PostgreSQL databases for performance and reliability
• Improve observability, monitoring, alerting and production reliability
• Deploy and operate your own services in AWS
• Participate in system design and make architectural decisions - including understanding and explaining the trade-offs
• Establish better engineering practices around testing, CI/CD, code reviews and production operations

What you will need:

• 4+ years of professional backend engineering experience
• Strong Python development experience
• Strong SQL and PostgreSQL skills
• Experience designing and building backend systems that run in production
• Experience developing REST APIs
• Experience deploying and operating services on AWS
• Experience with production operations - monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting and performance optimisation
• Experience working with financial data, market data, exchange APIs or other data-intensive systems
• Able to make architectural decisions and clearly explain the reasoning and trade-offs behind them
• Comfortable taking ownership of systems beyond simply writing code