Application Services Engineer - Trading - Low Latency

Square One Resources; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology recruitment agency is seeking an experienced Application Services Engineer for a contract role in London. This position requires a strong background in low latency network engineering and experience with support for real-time trading applications. You will be responsible for managing infrastructure, ensuring low latency connectivity, and driving technology adoption in monitoring and incident response tooling. This role offers a competitive rate and requires 3 days per week onsite.

Qualifications

• Strong background in low latency network engineering including TCP/IP and multicast.
• Experience with packet capture and analysis tools; ability to build custom decoders.
• Familiarity with SRE tools, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Manage the infrastructure supporting electronic business and collaborate across teams.
• Deliver solutions for low latency connectivity aligned with regulatory needs.
• Lead initiatives for continuous improvement and innovation in monitoring systems.

Skills

Low latency network engineering

Packet capture and analysis tools

Scripting and automation

Messaging middleware knowledge

Excellent communication skills

Tools

Wireshark

tcpdump

Corvil/PICO

ITRS Geneos

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

Overview

Job Title: Application Services Engineer - Trading - Low Latency
Location: London - 3 days per week in the office
Salary/Rate: Up to £500 per day INSIDE IR35
Start Date: 18/10/2025
Job Type: Contract

Responsibilities

• Be a member of the team responsible for the support and management of the infrastructure that supports the Bank's electronic business. Collaborate with core Infrastructure teams, development and the business to respond to requests and fault reports, often resolving issues quickly, under pressure, and sometimes out of hours. Participate in a range of infrastructure projects and tasks beyond business as usual activity.
• Deliver and support low latency connectivity and monitoring solutions for the Global Markets business, aligned with front-office trading and regulatory needs.
• Apply SRE principles to improve availability, latency, performance, and capacity planning across trading infrastructure.
• Collaborate with network and platform engineers to design reliable, self-healing systems and reduce manual intervention through automation.
• Own and execute the Global Markets connectivity roadmap, from project delivery through to operational handoff and lifecycle management.
• Partner with business stakeholders and platform owners to ensure infrastructure and observability tooling meet evolving trading requirements.
• Monitor and manage capacity and performance of global connectivity systems, working with regional teams to aggregate local intelligence.
• Conduct deep-dive post-incident analysis and forensic reviews during high-impact market events, using packet analysis to identify systemic improvements.
• Develop and maintain automated alerting, health checks, and dashboards to support proactive detection of issues and system degradation.
• Lead lab-based testing and benchmarking initiatives for new connectivity solutions, ensuring readiness for production deployment.
• Produce operational and performance KPIs, SLO/SLI metrics, and executive summaries to support senior decision-making.
• Champion continuous improvement and innovation, driving technology adoption in monitoring, resiliency, and incident response tooling.

Qualifications / Required Skills

• Strong background in low latency network engineering, including TCP/IP, multicast, traffic shaping, and performance analysis.
• Proven experience with packet capture and analysis tools (Wireshark, tcpdump, Corvil/PICO); ability to build custom decoders is highly advantageous.
• Familiarity with SRE tools and practices, including infrastructure as code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, error budgets, and reliability-focused SLIs/SLOs.
• Experience supporting real-time trading applications, including feed handlers, matching engines, and algo trading platforms.
• Strong working knowledge of messaging middleware (Solace, 29West, Tibco, LBM, or equivalent) in performance-sensitive environments.
• Proficient in scripting and automation using Python, Bash, or PowerShell to streamline monitoring, alerting, and recovery workflows.
• Knowledge of FIX, market data, and order routing protocols in a trading environment.
• Exposure to observability platforms such as ITRS Geneos, Prometheus, Grafana, or custom telemetry stacks.
• Comfortable working across Linux systems, hybrid infrastructure, and global production environments.
• Excellent communication and reporting skills, with ability to translate technical data into actionable business insights.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply now with your updated CV in Microsoft Word/PDF format.

Disclaimer

Notwithstanding any guidelines given to level of experience sought, we will consider candidates from outside this range if they can demonstrate the necessary competencies.

Square One is acting as both an employment agency and an employment business, and is an equal opportunities recruitment business. Square One embraces diversity and will treat everyone equally. Please see our website for our full diversity statement