Senior Software Engineer - Research Technology

DRW Holdings, LLC.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

DRW is seeking a Senior Software Engineer - Research Technology in London to design and operate compute-intensive analytics platforms. You will work on ingest, simulation, and research tooling in a fast-paced environment with onboarding support for trading contexts.

Responsibilities include building scalable data systems, optimizing performance, and mentoring junior teammates while delivering reliable software for researchers and trading teams.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience building large-scale, high-performance systems.
• Daily use of modern C++ (C++17) and Python.
• Experience with cluster-scale compute, scheduling, and reliability (Slurm, Kubernetes, Ray, Spark).
• Data-engineering focus on schema design, storage formats, and pipelines processing large data.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain high-performance software and data systems for researchers and trading teams.
• Implement raw exchange data pipelines in modern C++ for high-throughput processing.
• Orchestrate data and compute pipelines on HPC clusters for reliability.
• Create ad-hoc computation frameworks and tooling enabling rapid backtesting.
• Develop simulation frameworks integrated with trading platforms.
• Support training and deployment of quantitative models.
• Optimize code for performance, reliability, and resource efficiency.
• Mentor junior team members while contributing as an hands-on individual contributor.

Skills

Modern C++

Python

Data structures

Algorithms

Networking

OS concepts

Concurrency

System design

HPC clusters

Data pipelines

Tools

Slurm

Kubernetes

Ray

Spark

Parquet

Arrow

Job description

Senior Software Engineer - Research Technology

Senior Software Engineer - Research Technology

Job Location London

Employment type Regular

Department Technology

Targeted Start Date Immediate

DRW is a diversified trading firm with over 3 decades of experience bringing sophisticated technology and exceptional people together to operate in markets around the world. We value autonomy and the ability to quickly pivot to capture opportunities, so we operate using our own capital and trading at our own risk.

Headquartered in Chicago with offices throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, we trade a variety of asset classes including Fixed Income, ETFs, Equities, FX, Commodities and Energy across all major global markets. We have also leveraged our expertise and technology to expand into three non‑traditional strategies: real estate, venture capital and cryptoassets.

We operate with respect, curiosity and open minds. The people who thrive here share our belief that it’s not just what we do that matters–it's how we do it. DRW is a place of high expectations, integrity, innovation and a willingness to challenge consensus.

Build and operate the platform powering compute-intensive analysis of large event-stream datasets. The work resembles a game engine’s replay loop, a telecom packet pipeline, or a streaming analytics platform, applied to financial market data.

Our stack includes modern C++ for throughput-critical ingestion and simulation, Python with C++ bindings for research tooling, and distributed computing on HPC clusters. Your work will span exchange-data ingestion, HPC orchestration, simulation, and research tooling.

Trading experience is not required; we provide comprehensive onboarding.

Key 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.

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience building large-scale, high-performance systems; daily use of modern C++ (>=17) and Python expected.
• 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.

Desirable / nice-to-have

• Rust experience alongside C++ and Python.
• Slurm or other cluster scheduler expertise.
• Familiarity with ML/Deep Learning frameworks.
• Prior finance or market‑data experience, including low‑level market connectivity.
• GPU programming experience.
• Historical network / packet processing (telco, network appliances, packet‑capture replay infrastructure).
• Deterministic simulation and replay systems (game engines, cell simulators, distributed‑systems testing frameworks).
• Dev‑productivity or platform‑engineering for internal users (making other engineers or researchers faster and safer, at scale).

For more information about DRW's processing activities and our use of job applicants' data, please view our Privacy Notice at https://drw.com/privacy-notice .