Senior Software Engineer | ~£950/day Outside IR35 | 6-months initial contract | London
Industry: Trading
Location: London
Job Type: Contract - 6-month initial
Our client is building the next generation of execution and order management (EMS/OMS) infrastructure for global commodities trading. You will join a small, fast-moving engineering team designing and delivering a cloud-native trading platform from the ground up, tightly integrated with risk, pricing, and market data systems to support high-performance trading environments.
This is a senior, hands-on role for an engineer who wants end-to-end ownership — from low-level protocol integration through to distributed execution services and trader-facing tooling.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Design and build core components of a modern EMS/OMS platform, including order routing, order lifecycle management, venue connectivity, and execution analytics.
- Implement and maintain FIX protocol and venue-specific integrations across exchanges, brokers, and liquidity providers in commodities markets.
- Develop low-latency, distributed execution services with a strong focus on correctness, resilience, and performance under load.
- Collaborate closely with traders, quants, and risk engineers to translate trading workflows and execution strategies into robust production systems.
- Ensure seamless integration with risk systems, including pre-trade checks, position tracking, and post-trade processing.
Requirements
Essential
- Proven experience building execution systems and/or order management systems in production.
- Strong systems engineering fundamentals, including concurrency, distributed systems, networking, performance, and correctness under pressure.
- Production experience in at least one of C++, Rust, or Python, with willingness to work across multiple languages.
- Demonstrated ability to deliver production systems with a strong bias towards shipping, iteration, and user feedback.
- Comfortable working in a collaborative environment with direct engagement between engineers, traders, and quants.
- Experience working in cloud-native environments, particularly Kubernetes-based architectures.
- Familiarity with distributed data and event-driven systems (e.g. Kafka-style messaging patterns).
- Experience with observability, monitoring, testing, and production incident response in live systems.
Highly Desirable
- Experience in commodities markets (energy, metals, agriculture, freight) or other complex, multi-venue asset classes.
- Deep understanding of the FIX protocol, including session handling, message customisation, and venue-specific behaviour.
- Experience with algorithmic trading systems, smart order routing, or execution algorithm development.
- Exposure to real-time risk systems, including pre-trade controls and position/PnL infrastructure.
- Experience with columnar databases such as ClickHouse.