Senior KDB+ / q Software Engineer
Prime Brokerage Risk & Margining | Inside IR35 | £545 per day (Umbrella) | London
We're currently looking for an experienced Senior KDB+ / q Software Engineer to join a leading financial services organisation on an initial 13-week contract. This role will suit a hands-on engineer with deep expertise in KDB+/q development, real-time data platforms, and Prime Brokerage post-trade risk and margining environments.
Working within a high-performing engineering team, you'll be responsible for the development, optimisation, support and enhancement of business-critical applications and data platforms supporting front-office and risk functions.
Contract Details
- Contract Length: 13 weeks
- Start Date: ASAP
- Rate: £545 per day Umbrella
- Engagement: Inside IR35
- Location: London (30 Fenchurch Street)
- Working Model: Hybrid
The Role
You will play a key role in developing and supporting large-scale KDB+ platforms that process and distribute high-volume market and business data. The successful candidate will bring strong domain expertise within Prime Brokerage, Financing, Securities Lending, or Risk Management, allowing them to quickly contribute to complex post-trade workflows and risk calculations.
Key responsibilities include:
- Designing, developing and optimising KDB+/q solutions within large-scale production environments.
- Enhancing real-time market and business data ingestion, processing and distribution capabilities.
- Managing and optimising KDB ticker plant, RDB/HDB architectures and historical data platforms.
- Supporting data feed onboarding, integration and data quality controls.
- Troubleshooting complex production issues and providing Level 3 support for critical applications.
- Working closely with business users, traders, quantitative analysts and technology stakeholders.
- Supporting platform reliability, monitoring, root cause analysis and continuous improvement initiatives.
- Integrating KDB platforms with wider technology ecosystems including Java, Python and messaging technologies.
Essential Skills & Experience
- 10+ years' commercial experience developing with KDB+/q.
- Strong experience working within large-scale production environments.
- Deep understanding of Prime Brokerage post-trade risk and margining.
- Strong knowledge of time-series data modelling.
- Experience with KDB ticker plant, RDB/HDB architectures and performance optimisation.
- Proven production support and troubleshooting experience.
- Experience within Financing, Securities Lending, Prime Brokerage or Risk domains.
- Experience integrating KDB platforms with Java and/or Python applications.
- Knowledge of event-driven and messaging architectures such as Kafka.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
Desirable Experience
- Experience working directly with trading desks and quantitative teams.
- Platform reliability engineering and monitoring expertise.
- Exposure to enterprise-scale financial market data platforms.
- Experience improving data quality frameworks and controls.
Qualifications
- Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics or a related technical discipline.
