(Senior) Backend Engineer

Job description

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