Principal SQL Developer

Principal SQL Developer – Trading Desk | SQL Server, C#/.NET, Concurrent SQL environment | 25-Year Systematic Hedge Fund

• £140k-£180k circa base + bonus (up to 100%)
• City of London, on-site Mon-Fri

Our client, an algorithmic trading hedge fund with a 25-year track record in systematic trading, are hiring a Principal SQL Developer to join their trading desk tech team. It’s a 20-person business with roughly half the team in engineering and technical roles, so you’re in a genuinely tech-led environment where trading is fully programmatic and engineers work closely with the desk day to day.

They’re hiring a Principal SQL Developer to become the lead engineer responsible for their most business-critical platform: the internal trading dashboard that sits at the centre of the desk’s day-to-day activity. You’ll work closely with traders, quantitative researchers and the Founder, helping shape how financial market data is stored, modelled, queried and surfaced across the business.

The environment spans long-running futures trading systems, crypto trading infrastructure built over the last decade, and increasingly complex options datasets. A big part of the role is understanding what the business is trying to achieve with the data, then designing the right structures, workflows and tooling around it.

This is not a traditional ETL or pipeline engineering role. The systems are highly concurrent, transactional and real-time, with correctness and consistency being absolutely critical. A lot of the core business logic sits in SQL stored procedures, and the role spans both the database and application layers across SQL Server and C#/.NET systems while acting as a key link between the trading desk and wider engineering team.

Non-Negotiables

• SQL Server
• Concurrent SQL environments
• Stored Procedures
• Complex query optimisation
• Data modelling
• C# / .NET
• Front-office buy-side experience (hedge funds, asset management, systematic trading, OMS/PMS environments)
• Strong academics (2:1 or above in a technical discipline)

What You'll Work With

• SQL Server on Windows VMs in Azure
• C# / .NET
• Trading dashboard
• Portfolio and order management systems
• Real-time trading desk tooling
• Futures, crypto and options datasets
• Data visualisation
• Reporting and monitoring tools

Nice to Haves

• Front-office buy-side experience
• Systematic trading environments
• Quant research support
• OMS / PMS platforms
• Distributed systems exposure
• Legacy platform modernisation
• SQL Server performance tuning
• Trading desk interaction

Why Join

You’ll be joining a small team with high engineering standards, working alongside some very sharp people who care about doing things properly. There’s a strong culture of peer review and technical debate, and you’ll have real ownership from day one.

You’ll also be working directly with traders and senior leadership, so your work is closely tied to how the business performs.

The problems themselves are genuinely interesting, centred around correctness in a concurrent, real-time environment rather than scale.

Benefits

• Bonus up to 100% (performance-based, genuinely paid)
• 25 days holiday + bank hols
• Pension

Principal SQL Developer – Trading Desk | SQL Server, C#/.NET, Concurrent SQL environment | 25-Year Systematic Hedge Fund