Tech Lead

Flow Traders is seeking a versatile Technical Lead  to join our team and lead transformative projects across our technology landscape. This is a unique opportunity to join a leading proprietary trading firm with an entrepreneurial, innovative culture at the heart of its business. We value quick-witted, creative minds and challenge them to make full use of their capacities. The ideal candidate is a strong problem-solver who thrives in collaborative environments and can navigate complex problems from both software engineering and data engineering perspectives.

At Flow Traders, you will work on applications and data systems that support our core business. Our technology enables Flow Traders to be present and competitive on exchanges worldwide. You’ll design solutions for systems on or near the critical path—receiving market data and placing orders—and for pre-trade and post-trade systems that handle large volumes of data in a reliable, performant, and traceable manner.

Our Engineers continuously improve our proprietary trading platform by writing efficient code, designing innovative solutions, and maintaining existing systems with a focus on low latency, reliability, and observability. Markets are always changing, so we work in small business-aligned teams and follow agile practices to adapt quickly. We collaborate side-by-side with our business uses every day, creating short feedback loops and immediate insight into the value of each change. To foster collaboration and enable autonomy, we maintain shared libraries, encourage code reuse, and continuously evolve our views on application and data architecture.

What you will do

• Partner with the engineering manager to transition from legacy systems to modern, cloud-based architectures, emphasizing pragmatic use of managed services and low-code/no-code where appropriate.
• Lead end-to-end solution design: assess whether problems are best solved via custom software, data pipelines, or a combination of managed cloud services and reusable building blocks.
• Architect and develop efficient solutions using languages such as Python, Go, Rust, or Java (language choice driven by problem fit and performance needs).
• Design and evolve data platforms and pipelines leveraging tools such as Apache Airflow, Apache Kafka, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services (e.g., GKE, Dataproc, BigQuery).
• Define architectural standards for reliability, scalability, latency, data quality, and observability (metrics, tracing, logging).
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Trading, Data, Operations, Risk, Compliance) to ensure seamless delivery and alignment with business outcomes.
• Promote code reuse, shared libraries, platform capabilities, and best practices across teams.

What you need to succeed

• BSc or MSc in Computer Science or a related field

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  5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time in technical leadership or architectural roles

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  Deep knowledge of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and distributed systems

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  Experience designing and operating high-performance systems and data pipelines

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  Ability to evaluate trade-offs between custom code vs. managed services (e.g., GCP BigQuery/Dataproc/GKE) and to choose appropriate tools for the job

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  Strong communication skills; comfortable collaborating with both technical and business stakeholders

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  Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work in a fast-paced, collaborative environment

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  Strong sense of ownership, teamwork, and willingness to learn new skills

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  Experience with parallel and multithreaded programming

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  Hands-on experience with Airflow, Kafka, and GCP (especially GKE, Dataproc, BigQuery), or equivalent technologies

Nice to have

• Experience with Python (including Pandas) and data processing frameworks (Spark, Apache Beam, Apache NiFi)
• Experience with containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
• Previous experience in the trading industry or other low-latency, high-throughput environments
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, stream processing, and data governance
• Observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and CI/CD best practices

 

Flow Traders does not accept unsolicited resumes from any professional staffing or search firms. All resumes, and any other information identifying potential candidates, submitted to any employee at Flow Traders via-email, the Internet or directly without a valid and signed search agreement will be deemed free to contact by Flow Traders without any restrictions and no placement fee of any kind will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Flow Traders.