Senior Data Engineer

As a Senior Data Engineer at Keyrock, you'll build the Central Data Platform that serves trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research teams. You'll be one of the early hires in a newly formed Central Data Team, shaping both the platform and how the team operates as you build streaming and batch pipelines, self-serve tooling, and the data governance framework that keeps Keyrock's data flowing reliably across 80+ trading venues and multiple asset classes.

What you'll do

• Build streaming and batch pipelines that ingest, normalise, and distribute market, trading, and portfolio data, resilient to feed and exchange failures.
• Build self-serve tooling (SDKs, patterns, templates, AI agents) so other teams can publish, consume, and build on data products without waiting on you.
• Own data contracts and schema evolution to keep schema changes from turning into multi-team coordination events.
• Design the lakehouse and time-series layer around consumer query patterns.
• Build and evolve the Data Governance and Data Quality Framework covering stale-feed detection, schema validation, range checks, idempotent writes, lineage, ownership, and self-healing.
• Build derived analytics the business runs on, including cross-exchange spreads and VWAP at depth for trading desks, and portfolio views, exposure, and performance for wealth and asset management.
• Make observability, cost, and performance first-class from day one.
• Treat infrastructure as code (Docker, Terraform, CI/CD) alongside the Central Infrastructure Team.
• Work in the open by writing things down and partnering closely with Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and other teams.

What you bring

• 8+ years building production data systems that other teams rely on.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, including the ability to reason about what the database engine does with your queries.
• Code that's easy for someone else to read, test, and delete later.
• Strong understanding of data modelling for both streaming and analytical workloads.
• Efficiency, quality, idempotency, and observability as defaults in your work.
• Experience designing and operating streaming systems on Kafka, Redpanda, MSK, or Kinesis, with opinions about partitioning, consumer groups, offsets, and schema registries.
• Production experience with a time-series store (ClickHouse, TimescaleDB, QuestDB, or similar) and the ability to talk about table design as a function of query patterns.
• Lakehouse architecture experience where you reason about table layout, partitioning, and compaction as design choices that shape query performance and storage cost.
• The ability to build for self-healing and idempotency so reprocessing is safe, retries don't double-write, and the system recovers without human intervention.
• Fluency with Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD as your default way of working.
• You think about cost and performance early and instrument as you build with logs, metrics, and traces from day one.
• You design for data quality and governance up front, covering contracts, validation, lineage, and ownership.
• You reason from first principles when a problem is new, stay pragmatic when it isn't, and update your view when you learn more.
• You treat trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research as customers of what you build and communicate with them that way.
• You optimise for outcomes over output. A smaller, simpler thing that ships and works beats a bigger thing that doesn't.
• You take ownership end-to-end: design, ship, operate, improve.
• You say what you think including when it's unpopular, and you change your mind when the argument is better.
• You make the people around you better. Reviews are real, juniors grow from working with you, and peers want to work with you again.
• You're curious about how markets work. Data engineering on its own won't keep you interested here.
• You're honest about what you know and what you don't, and quick to close the gap.
• You understand financial market data: order books, trades, reference data, portfolios, exposures. Crypto, TradFi, or both are a strong plus.

Nice to have

• Lakehouse experience with Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake.
• Familiarity with DataHub or similar metadata and lineage platforms.
• Rust experience or strong interest. Some performance-critical services are written in Rust.

What we offer

• A from-scratch mandate to shape the platform, standards, and team culture alongside early hires in the Central Data Team.
• Strong partnerships with Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and the trading desks themselves, so you won't build in isolation.
• Autonomy on how you work including flexible hours, remote-first operations, and business-hours on-call shared across the team.
• A competitive salary package with various benefits.
• A team that likes each other with regular online get-togethers and a yearly onsite where everyone's in the same room.

About Keyrock

Keyrock is a leading market maker in digital assets, trading on more than 80 venues and partnering with a wide array of asset issuers. Founded in 2017, the company now spans market making, options trading, high-frequency trading, OTC, and DeFi trading desks, with over 250 team members across 42 nationalities in hubs in London, Brussels, and Singapore. Keyrock pioneers the use of Rust for algorithmic trading, supports Web3 startups through its Accelerator Program, and drives industry progress through research and governance initiatives.