Distributed Systems Software Engineer

Oxford Knight; Greater London; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Oxford Knight is seeking a Distributed Systems Software Engineer to join our London team. You will work on high-scale infrastructure, optimizing for latency, throughput, and reliability across the stack.

The role emphasizes ownership, collaboration with research and engineering teams, and delivering systems that enable real-time trading analytics and research workloads. Strong fundamentals and modern languages are expected.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Deep understanding of concurrency/parallelism.
• Knowledge of reliability, consistency and failure modes.
• Strong systems thinking.
• Experience with C++, Java, Python, Go, or Rust.

Responsibilities

• Develop distributed systems software and platform components.
• Improve scalability, throughput, latency and reliability.
• Collaborate across teams on research infrastructure.
• Work on scheduling, storage, messaging, fault tolerance and state replication.

Skills

Concurrency & parallelism

Reliability & failure modes

Systems thinking

Languages: C++/Java/Python/Go/Rust

Job description

Some of the most interesting distributed systems problems in technology aren’t currently sitting inside traditional Big Tech.

I’m working with several leading quantitative trading firms building infrastructure operating at extraordinary levels of scale, throughput, latency and reliability.

Trading firms need to process global real-time data, run enormous research workloads, maintain highly available trading systems and provide researchers with access to vast amounts of compute. Current public material across the sector describes everything from distributed state-machine replication to simulations running across tens of thousands of compute cores.

Depending on the team, you could work on:

• Scheduling and workload orchestration
• Distributed storage and data platforms
• High-throughput messaging
• Fault tolerance and state replication
• Research infrastructure
• HPC / CPU / GPU compute
• Observability and reliability
• Developer platforms and abstractions
• Performance engineering across compute, storage and networking

Looking for:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Deep understanding of concurrency and parallelism
• Knowledge of reliability, consistency and failure modes
• Strong systems thinking
• Experience with C++, Java, Python, Go, Rust or similar

Prior trading experience is not required for many of these teams. The firms I represent are particularly interested in engineers from Big Tech, infrastructure companies, databases, cloud platforms, HPC, developer infrastructure and other technically demanding environments.

The key difference versus many large technology companies is proximity to impact: small teams, significant ownership, extremely capable colleagues and systems where improvements in performance or reliability can have an immediate measurable effect.

Whilst we carefully review all applications, to all jobs, due to the high volume of applications we receive it is not possible to respond to those who have not been successful.

Distributed Systems Software Engineer London