Senior Software Engineer, Research Compute & Data Systems

P2P; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

DRW is seeking a senior software engineer to design, build, and operate high-performance data systems for quant researchers and trading teams. You will implement exchange data pipelines in modern C++ and coordinate HPC workflows for large-scale simulations.

Strong experience in C++ (>=17) and Python is required, with a track record of shipping production software and mentoring juniors in a data-intensive environment.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience building large-scale, high-performance systems.
• Strong CS fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, networking, OS, concurrency, and system design.
• Experience running compute at cluster scale: job scheduling, resource management, retries, and reliability. Slurm, Kubernetes, Ray, Spark, or custom internal schedulers all count.
• Proven data-engineering experience: schema design, storage formats, compression, I/O trade-offs, and pipelines processing hundreds of terabytes.
• Experience with columnar formats such as Parquet or Arrow, or comparable domain-specific formats used for event logs, telemetry, or replays.
• Experience designing and operating services or platforms used by other technical users in data-intensive environments.
• Demonstrated ability to ship production software safely and repeatedly, with an obsession for data driven quality.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain high-performance, scalable software and data systems used by quant researchers and trading teams.
• Implement raw exchange data pipelines in modern C++ and operate them at high-throughput scale.
• Orchestrate and improve reliability of data and compute pipelines on HPC clusters.
• Create ad-hoc computation frameworks and research tooling that let researchers slice, backtest, and iterate rapidly (Python + C++ integrations).
• Develop and maintain simulation frameworks tightly integrated with HFT/live trading platforms.
• Support training and deployment of quantitative models used in trading.
• Optimize codebases for performance, reliability, and resource efficiency across the full stack.
• Work primarily as a hands-on individual contributor while mentoring junior team members as needed.

Skills

C++

Python

Data structures

Algorithms

Networking

OS

Concurrency

System design

Tools

Slurm

Kubernetes

Ray

Spark

Job description

DRW is seeking a senior software engineer to design, build, and operate high-performance data systems for quant researchers and trading teams. You will implement exchange data pipelines in modern C++ and coordinate HPC workflows for large-scale simulations.

Strong experience in C++ (>=17) and Python is required, with a track record of shipping production software and mentoring juniors in a data-intensive environment.