Software Engineer (Data) (6 month contract)

Arcus Search; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 125,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading quantitative research firm in Greater London seeks a Contract Data Engineer to enhance data pipelines for financial market datasets. The role involves modernizing JVM-based data flows and contributing to data quality improvements using Kotlin and Python in a hybrid work environment. Successful candidates will have robust skills in data processing and development in a complex technical landscape.

Qualifications

• Experience with Kotlin and Spring Boot for data processing.
• Strong skills in Python for tooling and automation.
• Ability to modernize legacy JVM-based data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Enhance data pipelines for large-scale financial data.
• Modernize existing data flows and upgrade architectures.
• Contribute to improvements in data quality and performance.

Skills

Kotlin

Python

Data processing

SQL

Spark

Tools

SQL Server

Spring Boot

C#

Scala

Job description

Job Description

Contract Data Engineer (JVM / Kotlin / Python)

6-month initial contract | Onsite (potential for hybrid)

An elite quantitative research and trading firm is looking for a Contract Data Engineer to join a Reference Data Engineering team supporting critical research and trading use cases.

This team owns complex financial market datasets that describe how markets are structured and behave, and plays a key role in ensuring high-quality, reliable data flows across the organisation.

What you’ll be doing

• Owning and enhancing data pipelines that process large-scale financial market data
• Modernising existing data flows, upgrading legacy JVM-based pipelines into newer, cleaner architectures
• Remapping incoming datasets and rewriting ingestion and transformation pipelines
• Working across SQL Server, JVM applications, and Spark-based workloads
• Contributing improvements to data quality, performance, and maintainability

Tech environment

• Kotlin & Spring Boot for core data processing services
• Python for tooling and automation
• Legacy systems in C# and Scala / Spark
• Exposure to data lakes and large-scale data platforms is a strong plus