Software Engineer - Trade Systems

Dex; Greater London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Dex's partner company is seeking an experienced systems engineer to build observability and deployment tooling for real-time trading systems. You will design and operate fault-tolerant platforms that support live financial research, pushing the boundaries of reliability in a federated engineering environment.

You thrive in high-pressure settings, have deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containerisation, and OpenTelemetry, and you enjoy collaborating across research and engineering teams

Qualifications

• Experience designing distributed real-time systems.
• Proven expertise in observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Strong debugging skills under pressure and in unfamiliar systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement observability infrastructure for real-time trading systems.
• Engineer deployment tooling and CI/CD pipelines for safe releases.
• Build fault-tolerant platforms to support live financial research.
• Identify and mitigate operational risks beyond incident response.
• Collaborate across engineering and research teams to define runtime boundaries and safety.

Skills

Distributed real-time systems

Debugging under pressure

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Kubernetes

Containerisation

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

CI/CD pipelines

Release 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.

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