Software Engineer - Trade Systems

Dex; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Dex's trusted partner is seeking an experienced engineer to design and operate the observability platform that underpins real-time trading research. You will build deployment tooling, fault-tolerant infrastructure, and high-availability systems for a federated engineering environment.

You will bring hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containerisation, and OpenTelemetry, and you will shape SLOs while implementing robust monitoring and release tooling for critical live systems.

Qualifications

• Deep experience with distributed and real-time systems engineering.
• Strong debugging instincts under pressure in unfamiliar systems.
• Proven experience building observability platforms and designing SLOs.
• CI/CD and deployment automation experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement observability infrastructure (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) for real-time trading systems.
• Engineer deployment tooling and CI/CD pipelines to enable safe, reliable releases across federated teams.
• Build and maintain fault-tolerant, high-availability platforms supporting live financial research.
• Identify and mitigate operational risks, aiming for systemic prevention rather than reactive fixes.
• Collaborate across multiple engineering and research teams to define runtime boundaries and platform safety.

Skills

Distributed systems

Real-time systems

Debugging under pressure

Cross-team collaboration

System design

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker / Containerisation

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

CI/CD tooling

Job description

This role is with one of Dex's trusted partner companies. We work closely with their teams to truly understand their culture, goals, and what they're looking for, so we can match you with the right opportunity and give you context about the role before you commit to a process.

The role

Quantitative research drives this firm. They apply machine learning and big data to complex financial datasets, operating at the forefront of live markets. Your work here directly underpins that research, building the engineering platform that makes it all possible. This role sits at the heart of that platform. You'll build the observability infrastructure, deployment tooling, and fault-tolerant operations for a large, federated engineering organisation. This is a hands-on engineering seat with real breadth, not just reactive support. You will actively engineer systems to make incidents less likely, and less severe.

The work

• Design and implement observability infrastructure (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) for complex, real-time trading systems.
• Engineer deployment tooling and CI/CD pipelines to ensure safe, reliable releases across a federated engineering environment.
• Build and maintain fault-tolerant, high-availability platforms that directly support live financial research.
• Proactively identify and mitigate operational risks, moving beyond reactive incident response to systemic prevention.
• Collaborate across multiple engineering teams and research functions to define runtime boundaries and strengthen platform safety.

What You Bring

• Deep experience with distributed and real-time systems engineering.
• Production-level expertise in Kubernetes, containerisation, and orchestration at scale.
• Proven track record building and operating observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and designing SLOs.
• Strong debugging instincts; you can quickly diagnose and resolve complex issues in unfamiliar systems under pressure.
• Experience with CI/CD and deployment automation, specifically building release tooling for high-stakes environments.