Senior Data Engineer

As a Senior Data Engineer at Keyrock, you'll be one of the first members of the Central Data Team, building the Keyrock Data Platform from the ground up. You'll own streaming and batch pipelines, self-serve tooling, and data infrastructure that powers trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research across a 250-person organization working on digital asset trading and market making.

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 publish, consume, and build on data products without waiting on you.
• Own data contracts and schema evolution to prevent 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, including stale-feed detection, schema validation, range checks, idempotent writes, lineage, ownership, and self-healing capabilities.
• Build derived analytics the business runs on, such as cross-exchange spreads, VWAP at depth, order book microstructure 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 of building production data systems that other people rely on.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, including the ability to reason about what the database engine is doing 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.
• Design and operational experience with 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 such as ClickHouse, TimescaleDB, or QuestDB, and the ability to talk about table design as a function of query patterns.
• Experience with lakehouse architecture and reasoning about table layout, partitioning, and compaction as design choices that shape query performance and storage cost.
• Building for self-healing and idempotency, where reprocessing is safe, retries don't double-write, and the system recovers without human intervention.
• Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD as core parts of how you work.
• Thinking about cost and performance early in the design process.
• Instrumentation and observability (logs, metrics, traces) as part of the system from day one.
• Designing for data quality and governance up front, covering contracts, validation, lineage, and ownership.
• First-principles reasoning when a problem is new, pragmatism when it isn't, and willingness to update your view when you learn more.
• Treating trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research as customers of what you build.
• Optimising for outcomes over output: preferring smaller, simpler solutions that ship and work over bigger things that don't.
• Taking end-to-end ownership: design, ship, operate, improve.
• Saying what you think, including unpopular takes, and changing your mind when the argument is better.
• Making the people around you better through real reviews and helping juniors and peers grow.
• Curiosity about how markets work; data engineering alone won't keep you interested here.
• Honesty about what you know and what you don't, and speed in closing the gap.
• Understanding of financial market data: order books, trades, reference data, portfolios, exposures. Crypto, traditional finance, or both are strong pluses.

Nice to have

• Lakehouse experience with Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake.
• Familiarity with DataHub or similar metadata and lineage platforms.
• Rust experience or interest; some of our performance-critical services are written in Rust, and fluency isn't required.

What we offer

• A from-scratch mandate to shape the platform, standards, and team culture as one of the first hires in the Central Data Team.
• Strong partners in Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and the trading desks themselves, so you won't be building data in isolation.
• Flexible hours, remote-first work, and business-hours on-call shared across the team.
• Competitive salary package with various benefits.
• Regular online get-togethers and a yearly onsite where the whole team is in the same room.

About Keyrock

Since 2017, Keyrock has grown to be a leading market maker in digital assets, trading on more than 80 venues with a diverse team of 250 people across 42 nationalities in hubs in London, Brussels, and Singapore. The company spans market making, options trading, high-frequency trading, OTC, and DeFi trading desks, and is a pioneer in using Rust for algorithmic trading. Keyrock also runs an Accelerator Program for Web3 startups and contributes to ecosystem development through liquidity provision and research initiatives.