Senior Software Engineer (Platform)

Longshot Systems Ltd; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A technology firm focusing on trading platforms is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to enhance its trading platform. The role involves architecting solutions, optimizing performance, and ensuring system stability. Candidates should have deep experience with mission-critical distributed systems and be skilled in a systems language like Go or C++. The position supports hybrid working, allowing flexibility while meeting team goals. Excellent communication in English is essential, alongside a strong educational background in quantitative or technical fields.

Benefits

Competitive bonus scheme

10% matched pension contributions

Private healthcare insurance

Long term illness insurance

Gym membership

Qualifications

• Deep experience with distributed systems where throughput and availability are critical.
• Clear, idiomatic designs in at least one systems language.
• Ability to communicate technical details effectively.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement solutions to meet product, performance, or stability goals.
• Integrate trading venues and optimize platform components.
• Contribute to coding standards, CI/CD, and security.

Skills

Experience building mission critical distributed systems

Proven track record shipping products in small teams

Competence in systems languages (Go, C++, Rust, Java, C#)

Familiarity with AWS and DevOps

Fluent written and spoken English

Education

Masters or PhD in Maths, Engineering, Physics, Computer Science

Job description

At Longshot Systems we build advanced platforms for sports betting analytics and trading.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the team that owns and develops our trading platform. Longshot is a small, focused company and so the role suits someone who can architect and implement whatever is needed to meet our next product, performance or stability goal. The team owns the technical standards and coding guidelines, CI/CD, observability and security. This role suits someone who wants to ship features and contribute to the wider technical excellence in the team and platform.

The trading platform at Longshot handles integrations with many bookmakers and exchanges worldwide. It normalises and combines the global odds data for many sports and makes it available internally for strategies to trade on. We handle thousands of odds updates and trades per second and have very strict bounds on latency, correctness and overall quality of the feed and trading. You would be at the heart of this team: integrating more trading venues, optimising key parts of the platform, making trading safer and faster, etc. We also maintain a significant historical data repository and support wider trading and research efforts around the company.

Our key platform systems are all in Golang, with message buses and databases at the core of the architecture. You don’t need to be fluent in Golang, but it would help. It’s easy to learn and we have a team full of experts able to teach you.

We are a hybrid working company, working Thursdays in our London (Farringdon) office and flexible the rest of the week. Our typical working hours are 10 am to 6 pm UK time, Monday to Friday, but we support flexible working and trust our team to manage their own schedules to meet their goals.

Interview Process

1. Intro call (30 mins) - your background + interests
2. 1st Technical interview (30 mins) - live code review & pair programming
3. 2nd Technical interview (60 mins) - deep dive technical questions
4. Full assessment day (10:30–5pm) - a one day systems programming exercise designed to be similar to the real work we do in the team. Meet some of the team, see the office, have a nice lunch (on us).

• Masters or PhD in a quantitative or technical subject (e.g. Maths, EE, Physics, Comp Sci) from a top university
• Deep experience building mission critical distributed systems (finance, gaming, telco, ad-tech, etc.) where throughput, correctness and availability are a hard requirement.
• Startup experience: Proven track record shipping products in small, fast moving teams.
• Proven track record delivering and maintaining production systems in at least one systems language (Go, C++, Rust, Java, C#, etc.), with clear, idiomatic designs.
• Architecture & design: Able to reason about trade offs and produce clean, evolvable service boundaries.
• Cloud & DevOps: comfortable working in AWS, linux and wrangling build pipelines. We have dedicated DevOps people, but you do need to be competent in the core skills here.
• Fluent written and spoken English. Communicating with the team is as important as the technical work. You need to be able to effectively collaborate on everything from low level details to long term strategic planning.

Nice to have

• Trading, market making or exchange experience.

Benefits

• Competitive bonus scheme
• 10% matched pension contributions
• Private healthcare insurance
• Long term illness insurance
• Gym membership