Trading System Architect

ICEO - Venture Builder; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first company

Flexible working hours

38 days of paid vacation leave

14 days of paid sick leave

Job summary

A financial technology company in the United Kingdom seeks a Trading System Architect to bridge quantitative strategies and core engineering. The ideal candidate will have over 5 years of experience at trading firms, expertise in sub-millisecond order execution, and deep JVM knowledge. This role offers remote work flexibility, 38 days of paid vacation, and a collaborative environment that values autonomy and innovation.

Qualifications

• Experience with HFT firms, market makers, or top crypto exchanges.
• Ability to analyze and solve complex technical problems.
• Familiarity with cloud to bare-metal transitions.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate on system architecture with Head of Technology.
• Research and prototype architectural optimizations.
• Conduct performance analysis to identify inefficiencies.
• Ensure technical implementations align with trading realities.
• Provide technical guidance throughout product lifecycle.
• Mentor engineering team on low-latency trading constraints.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Skills

Over 5 years of experience in trading systems

Sub-millisecond order execution expertise

JVM language development

System architecture for trading

Knowledge of FIX, WebSocket, REST API

Multithreading concepts

Strong ownership and self-motivation

Communication skills (B2 level English)

Job description

Trading System Architect at ICEO - Venture Builder

Role Description

A highly specialized engineer who will bridge the gap between our quantitative trading strategies and our core engineering implementation. We require a senior engineer with deep domain experience in trading systems to guide architectural decisions, ensuring our systems are optimized for market microstructure, latency, and risk safety.

You will act as a high-level technical advisor and individual contributor, validating our architectural path and preventing costly domain-specific mistakes. Your voice will be crucial in defining the system architecture and making technical decisions to ensure optimized order execution.

We value domain experience over raw coding volume. We prefer a solid engineer who has spent years strictly in the trading domain and understands “why” systems fail, over a rockstar developer who has only worked in generic tech. You are pragmatic, focusing on stability and predictable latency over theoretical perfection.

Technical Challenges

• Lots of data – processing millions of transactions and market pairs data points daily
• Technical complexity – integrating with various exchanges requires careful design and essential monitoring systems to ensure a robust platform
• Scalability – developing solutions to efficiently process and store millions of transactions for subsequent analysis
• Latency – reducing communication latency across multiple physical regions to a minimum

What do you need

• Over 5 years of experience working at an HFT firm, market maker, algorithmic trading firm, or top crypto exchange with trading-related responsibilities.
• Considerable expertise in developing systems with sub‑millisecond order execution.
• JVM language development background with deep knowledge of the JVM internals.
• Experience in building system architecture for trading systems.
• Familiarity with FIX, WebSocket, and REST API limitations in a trading context.
• Good theoretical knowledge of spot and futures trading internals.
• Proven ability to analyze and solve complex technical problems.
• Familiarity with multithreading concepts and distributed computing.
• Self‑motivated with a strong sense of ownership, capable of working independently with minimal supervision.
• Great communication skills with both technical and non‑technical people.
• Proficient in both written and spoken English, at a B2 level or higher.

Nice to have

• Scala and/or functional programming experience.
• Experience transitioning systems from Cloud (GCP/AWS) to bare‑metal or hybrid environments.

Your responsibilities

• Architectural Advisory – collaborate with the Head of Technology to define the system architecture and provide domain context for connectivity, execution routing, and state management.
• Performance Engineering & PoCs – research and prototype architectural optimizations, building Proofs of Concept for high‑performance components such as evaluating tools like Aeron or optimizing order execution.
• Continuous Performance Analysis – regularly profile the production environment with our Performance Engineer and analyze system behavior post‑factum to identify latency outliers, inefficiencies, and network overheads.
• System Behavior & Risk Logic – ensure technical implementation aligns with trading realities by validating logic for synthetic market generation, handling exchange disconnects, and managing order state during high‑volatility events.
• Provide technical guidance and support throughout the product lifecycle, including early stages of development.
• Technical Mentorship – elevate the domain knowledge of the engineering team through design reviews and feedback, helping generic backend engineers understand constraints of low‑latency trading systems.
• Lead and collaborate with cross‑functional teams, working closely with engineers, analytics, and other groups to navigate varying levels of detail.

What we offer

• Remote‑first company – you can work from anywhere in the world.
• Flexible working hours – core hours are 11 am–3 pm CET with flexibility outside this window.
• 38 days of paid vacation leave and 14 days of paid sick leave.
• Autonomy to make decisions and explore new ideas in a forward‑thinking team.

The recruitment process

1. Stage 1 – Screening meeting with Talent Acquisition Partner: basic information about ICEO, the project, the role, and the offer. General questions about your experience (about 30 minutes).
2. Stage 2 – Technical Interview with Senior Developer (1 hour).
3. Stage 3 – Final Interview with Head of Technology (1 hour).

Seniority level

• Mid‑Senior level

Employment type

• Full‑time