Principal Data Engineer

hkex; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

HKEX is seeking a Principal Data Engineer in London to shape a strategic data platform for high-volume trading data. You will deliver scalable, resilient infrastructure that serves analytics and trading workloads, enabling fast innovation.

You will influence technology strategy across Trading Tech, Data Eng, and Platform Eng, building self-service data capabilities and secure, compliant systems across Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, Spark, and Trino.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software development, JVM stack preferred.
• Expertise building scalable data platforms, data warehouses and lakes.
• Experience solving large-scale distributed system challenges.
• Ability to provide self-service data onboarding, processing and discovery.
• Influence tech strategy across multiple teams and platforms.
• Proven capability to design data lakehouse solutions and streaming pipelines.
• Strong security and governance practices for data platforms.

Responsibilities

• Shape a strategic data platform for high-volume, high-velocity trading data.
• Deliver scalable, resilient data infrastructure for analytics and trading workloads.
• Build self-service capabilities for data onboarding, processing, and discovery.
• Lead platform security, governance, and regulatory compliance.

Skills

JVM languages

Scalable data platforms

Self-service platform

Fault-tolerant systems

Cloud-native engineering

Leadership/coordination

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Apache Kafka

Apache Flink

Spark

Trino

S3-compatible storage

Iceberg

DataHub/OpenMetadata/Atlas

Terraform

Job description

Principal Data Engineer

Shift Pattern: Standard 40 Hour Week (United Kingdom)

Scheduled Weekly Hours: 40

Corporate Grade: C – Vice President

Reporting Line: (UK Division) Information Technology

Location: UK-London

Worker Type: Permanent

The purpose of this role is to help shape the LME's strategic data platform which can reliably process, store, and serve high-volume, high-velocity trading data at scale, while providing engineering teams with reusable, self-service capabilities that accelerate the delivery of trading and analytical solutions.

Success in this role means delivering a highly scalable and resilient data platform that becomes the engineering foundation for all data-intensive trading workloads, enabling faster innovation, improved reliability, reduced operational complexity, and better utilisation of market and trading data across the organisation.

Strong Required Demonstrable Experience of:

• 10+ years of experience with software development, preferably working with JVM based languages (Java/Scala/Kotlin).
• Provide expertise on the development of highly scalable data platforms, data warehouses (SQL server, Postgres), and modern data lakes.
• Solve complex scalability, reliability, latency, and performance challenges associated with large-scale distributed systems.
• Provide self-service platform capabilities that allow engineering teams to onboard, process, discover, and consume data efficiently.
• Influence technology strategy and roadmaps across Trading Technology, Data Engineering, and Platform Engineering functions.
• Build high-volume distributed data platforms capable of processing billions of events per day and managing terabytes scale datasets.
• Develop modern Data Lakehouse platforms leveraging S3-compatible object storage, Apache Iceberg, Spark, and Trino.
• Build real-time streaming integration using Apache Kafka and Apache Flink for low-latency event processing, enrichment, and data distribution.
• Drive performance engineering and scalability across data ingestion, storage, streaming, query, and analytics platforms.
• Design and build self-service data platform capabilities including APIs, data products, metadata services, and developer enablement frameworks.
• Implement cloud-native platform engineering practices using Kubernetes/OpenShift, Terraform, CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Lead metadata, lineage, and data discovery capabilities using technologies such as DataHub, OpenMetadata, or Apache Atlas to improve platform transparency and usability.
• Ensure platform security and regulatory compliance through fine-grained access controls, encryption, secrets management, auditing, and secure-by-design engineering principles.

Bonus for knowledge of:

• Automation/configuration management using toolsets such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible or equivalent
• Docker and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge and understanding of financial markets.
• Setting up CI/CD pipelines using Bamboo.
• Confluent certified developer for Apache kafka.
• Dollar Universe

Personal Qualities:

• Ability to work under pressure with changing priorities, with a view to resolving issues innovatively, and meeting key stakeholders expectations.
• A dynamic and self-motivated attitude
• Accountable and proactive
• Able to provide leadership and motivate team demonstrating strong interpersonal skills
• Must display strong analytical skills and attention for detail.
• Demonstrates pragmatic judgement, balancing risk and business value to reach decisions which are well informed and actionable.