Senior Software Engineer - Market Data Platform, Ticker Plant Runtime Services

United States Digital Space LLC; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

The Ticker Plant team at United States Digital Space LLC is building one of the world's most sophisticated real-time market data systems, processing hundreds of billions of financial events daily across millions of instruments.

As an SRE, you will ensure correctness, performance and availability by designing interfaces, debugging production issues, and contributing to distributed systems. Proficiency in C/C++, Python or Java and strong Linux knowledge are essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field.
• Experience with object-oriented programming languages (C/C++, Python, Java).
• Experience designing and scaling distributed, fault-tolerant systems.

Responsibilities

• Read, debug, and write production-quality code and instruments for production.
• Design interfaces and workflows across components to support production systems.
• Investigate and diagnose system behavior and incidents to prevent recurrence.

Skills

C/C++

Python

Java

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

Linux/Unix

Job description

The Ticker Plant team is building one of the world's most sophisticated real-time market data systems, processing hundreds of billions of financial events daily across millions of instruments. Our platform is the backbone of the company's market data platform, serving as the source of truth for global financial markets.

Who are we?

The SRE team is central to Ticker Plant's success and are at the intersection of systems engineering and financial technology. We are engineers whose expertise centers on the emergent properties of a massively distributed, large-scale, real-time market data system. Our mission aligns with our customers' expectations, and we focus on the characteristics of the system they care about, namely:

• Correctness - the data a customer sees should accurately reflect the marketplace
• Performance - real-time latencies should be minimised; requests should be served without delay
• Availability - System components will fail; in a sufficiently large system, parts of it fail all the time. But the system as a whole should not fail. Deployments and upgrades should not affect availability.

We'll trust you to:

• Code - to read code, to debug code, and to write production-quality code. We provide software that defines the environment in which the component software runs. We build dashboards that are used to analyse current load and latency and plan for the impact of anticipated changes, but we also build the toolkits that allow for the software to be instrumented in the first place. Our platform technology provides self-service for many routine operations, and supports our Incident Response responsibilities.
• Design - We write code that integrates with components across the entire system. Often this work is done in collaboration with component teams. Our work with the component owners involves assessing workflows and designing appropriate interfaces that provide consistent access to the necessary functionality, and then building the applications that can perform many workflows via self-service or even automatically. Also, as components and product features move to production, we ensure that the features that are being introduced are supportable in production, without increasing operational load. Sometimes, this means advising the component team of existing solutions; in other cases, it means recognising gaps and filling those accordingly. This results in improving the designs of our features and our system.
• Analyse - Our key concern is the behaviour of the system. Often, we are asked to consider the impact of required or desired changes to the system before those changes make it to production. At other times, the system is simply not behaving as we expect, with no immediate obvious cause. We are the ones who are often asked to figure out what is going on.

You'll need to have:

• Experience with an object-oriented programming language (C/C++, Python, Java, etc.)
• A Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, similar field of study or equivalent work experience
• Prior contributions to system design and architecture and scaling fault-tolerant, distributed systems
• Honest approach to problem-solving, and ability to collaborate with peers, partners and management

Why this role matters:

The market data infrastructure you'll help build and improve is mission-critical for the global financial industry. Your work will directly impact:

• The accuracy of financial market data worldwide
• The reliability of the company's core services
• The evolution of our market data architecture
• The future of financial technology

We'd love to see:

• We primarily use C++ and Python, but an ability to present working solutions in any high-level programming language is sufficient to get started. We want to be clear here - this is a development position.
• In-depth knowledge of Linux/Unix
• Experience with blameless postmortems
• A passion for performance excellence, robustness and engineering mindset

Discover what makes the company unique - watch our podcast series for an inside look at our culture, values, and the people behind our success.

Accommodations

the company provides reasonable adjustment/accommodation to individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable adjustment/accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable adjustment/accommodation include but are not limited to making a change to the application process or work procedures, providing documents in an alternate format or using specialized equipment. To request an adjustment/accommodation to apply for a job, please email AMER\[e-mail] (Americas), EMEA\[e-mail] (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), or APAC\[e-mail] (Asia-Pacific), based on the region you are submitting an application for. We may share your information with a third party provider of accommodations services who may use this information to reach out to you for the purposes of accommodating your application.

Equal Opportunity

the company is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination in employment. It is the company’s policy to provide equal opportunity and access for all persons, and the Company is committed to attracting, retaining, developing, and promoting the most qualified individuals without regard to age, ancestry, color, gender identity or expression, genetic predisposition or carrier status, marital status, national or ethnic origin, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, self-identified or perceived sex, sexual and other reproductive health decisions, parental or caring status, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, or parental leave, protected veteran status, status as a victim of domestic violence, or any other classification protected by applicable law (each, a “Protected Characteristic”). the company prohibits treating applicants or employees less favorably in connection with the terms and conditions of employment, in all phases of the employment process, because of one or more Protected Characteristics.