Principal Engineer, CoinDesk Data Engineering

P2P; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Bullish, a global digital asset platform, is looking for a Principal Backend Engineer on the CoinDesk Data Engineering team in the UK. You’ll shape the technical direction for high‑throughput services, spanning REST and streaming, and own core infrastructure in a 24/7 financial environment.

You’ll mentor senior engineers, drive architectural decisions, and advance observability, tooling, and testing. If you can navigate ambiguity with pragmatic choices and communicate effectively with

Qualifications

• 8+ years in backend development with staff/leadership experience.
• Deep, hands-on experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with high availability and disaster recovery for 24/7 financial‑grade systems.
• Proficiency in multiple languages, notably Node.js or Golang.
• Experience with modern databases (Redis, PostgreSQL) and messaging (Kafka/RabbitMQ).
• Strong CI/CD, IaC, observability, and DevSecOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Drive a cohesive long-term technical roadmap for services (REST, streaming).
• Lead design of high-throughput, resilient systems and secure infra.
• Own data resiliency, uptime, and client-facing infrastructure.
• Mentor engineers on architecture, trade-offs, and best practices.
• Lead cross-team improvements in observability and tooling.

Skills

Distributed Systems

DevSecOps

Technical leadership

Communication

Tools

Node.js

Golang

Redis

PostgreSQL

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Job description

About Bullish

Bullish is an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides market infrastructure and information services. These include: Bullish Exchange – a regulated and institutionally focused digital assets spot and derivatives exchange, integrating a high-performance central limit order book matching engine with automated market making to provide deep and predictable liquidity. Bullish Exchange is regulated in Germany, Hong Kong, and Gibraltar. CoinDesk Indices – a collection of tradable proprietary and single-asset benchmarks and indices that track the performance of digital assets for global institutions in the digital assets and traditional finance industries. CoinDesk Data – a broad suite of digital assets market data and analytics, providing real-time insights into prices, trends, and market dynamics. CoinDesk Insights – a digital asset media and events provider and operator of Coindesk.com, a digital media platform that covers news and insights about digital assets, the underlying markets, policy, and blockchain technology.

Reports to:

Director, Engineering, CoinDesk

Engineering Organisation & Culture

At CoinDesk, we do more than report on the future of money; we actively help shape it. As the global leader in crypto news, indices, and events, we provide the transparency and context the world needs to understand the digital asset revolution. Our team is dedicated to a shared mission of informing, educating, and connecting the global community.

Our impact is further amplified by our position within the Bullish Group. Operating as a subsidiary of Bullish, a regulated, institutional-grade exchange known for its technological prowess, CoinDesk is powered by a partner that shares our fundamental belief in the transformative power of digital assets.

We value engineers who treat development as a craft and own the outcome from concept to deployment. You will be expected to navigate the unknown, bring structure to ambiguity, and help shape the frameworks and processes that drive our global teams forward. We refuse to compromise on quality and seek problem solvers who thrive on high-impact technical challenges.

The Team: CoinDesk Data Engineering

The CoinDesk Data Engineering Team builds the high-performance infrastructure that powers the world's most trusted crypto market data, architecting resilient systems that process over 26 billion monthly requests for real-time market information. Our technical scope is expansive, encompassing the automated extraction and normalization of data from global exchanges to be served via high-throughput REST APIs, WebSocket streaming, and direct client deliveries. We operate with a high degree of ownership over mission-critical infrastructure, calculating the flagship indices that power some of the largest ETFs on the market while bridging the gap between creative freedom and institutional-grade stability. As a core part of the global leader in crypto news and indices, our work provides the transparency and context necessary to help shape the future of money.

What You’ll Do

• Drive Technical Evolution: Develop and champion a cohesive, long-term technical roadmap that elevates our existing services (internal, external, REST, streaming) towards a unified and scalable architectural vision.

• Architect for the Future: Lead the design of resilient, high-throughput systems, ensuring new solutions are not only robust and secure but also set the standard for future development across teams.

• Tackle Foundational Challenges: Act as the technical point person for our most complex cross-team challenges, such as ensuring data resiliency, uptime, or evolving our client facing infrastructure without service interruption.

• Elevate Engineering Excellence: Mentor senior engineers on advanced architectural patterns, trade-off analysis, and operational best practices, fostering a culture of technical curiosity and ownership.

• Champion Cross-Cutting Initiatives: Identify and lead engineering-wide improvements in areas like observability, developer tooling, and testing strategies to increase performance and reliability across all services.

What You’ll Bring

• Principal-Level Experience: 8+ years in backend development, with a proven track record in a Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical leadership role where you were responsible for the technical direction of multiple services.

• Expertise in Distributed Systems: Deep, hands-on experience designing, building, and operating complex, large-scale distributed systems. You should have specific experience with both synchronous (e.g. REST APIs) and asynchronous (e.g. WebSockets, message queues like Kafka or RabbitMQ, event streams) communication patterns.

• Operational Resilience: Experience with High Availability or sophisticated disaster recovery strategies for global, 24/7 financial systems.

• Pragmatic Polyglot: Demonstrated ability to effectively use multiple languages in production environments (a proficiency in either Node.js or Golang) and the expertise to choose the right technology for the problem at hand.

• Strategic Buy vs. Build: Lead the evaluation of third-party vendors versus internal builds for core data infrastructure to ensure cost-efficiency and performance.

• Data-Intensive Application Expertise: Strong practical experience with modern databases (e.g., Redis, PostgreSQL), including schema design, query optimization, and performance tuning for high-throughput workloads.

• Full Lifecycle Ownership: A strong "DevSecOps" mindset with expertise in building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and robust observability (monitoring, logging, tracing) for production systems.

• Quality as a Feature: A deep commitment to quality, demonstrated by implementing comprehensive testing strategies (unit, integration, end-to-end, performance) that ensure system reliability.

• Influence and Collaboration: Exceptional communication skills with the proven ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders, articulate complex architectural decisions, and build consensus across multiple teams.

Nice to Haves

• Cloud Architecture: Experience designing and deploying services on a major cloud provider (Azure, GCP).

• Blockchain Expertise: A strong understanding of blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and decentralized ecosystems is a significant plus.

• Financial Market Knowledge: Interest or prior experience in traditional financial markets, trading systems, or investment platforms.

• Containerization & Deployment: Proficiency with containerization technologies such as Docker or Kubernetes.

• Observability: Hands-on experience with modern observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus, DataDog, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry).

• Data Governance: Experience with data privacy (GDPR/CCPA) and security compliance in a regulated financial environment.

Please note you will need the right to work in the UK.

Bullish is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are fast evolving and striving towards being a globally-diverse community. With integrity at our core, our success is driven by a talented team of individuals and the different perspectives they are encouraged to bring to work every day.