Senior Data Engineer

As a Senior Data Engineer at Keyrock, you'll be one of the first hires in the Central Data Team, building the Keyrock Data Platform from the ground up. This platform will serve the entire company-trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research-with real-time data and context. You'll shape the standards, architecture, and team culture as you build streaming and batch pipelines, self-serve tooling, and the governance frameworks that make data trustworthy across the organisation.

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 such as SDKs, patterns, templates, and AI agents so other teams can publish, consume, and build on data products without waiting on you.
• Own data contracts and schema evolution, and 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, covering stale-feed detection, schema validation, range checks, idempotent writes, lineage, ownership, and self-healing.
• Build the derived analytics the business runs on: cross-exchange spreads, VWAP at depth, and order book microstructure for the trading desks; portfolio views, exposure, and performance for wealth and asset management.
• Make observability, cost, and performance first-class priorities from day one.
• Treat infrastructure as code using Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD alongside the Central Infrastructure Team.
• Work in the open: document your work and partner closely with Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and other teams.

What you bring

• 8+ years building production data systems that other people rely on.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, including the ability to reason about what the engine is doing with your queries.
• Code that is easy for others to read, test, and maintain.
• A strong understanding of data modelling for both streaming and analytical workloads.
• Experience designing and operating streaming systems on Kafka, Redpanda, MSK, or Kinesis, with opinions on partitioning, consumer groups, offsets, and schema registries.
• Production experience with a time-series store such as ClickHouse, TimescaleDB, or QuestDB, and the ability to reason about table design as a function of query patterns.
• Experience working with lakehouse architecture, reasoning about table layout, partitioning, and compaction as design choices.
• Ability to build for self-healing and idempotency, ensuring reprocessing is safe and the system recovers without human intervention.
• Proficiency with Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD as part of your day-to-day work.
• The ability to think about cost and performance early in the design process.
• An approach to instrumentation that includes logs, metrics, and traces from day one.
• An ability to reason from first principles on new problems, stay pragmatic on familiar ones, and update your view when you learn more.
• The ability to treat trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research as customers of what you build.
• A focus on outcomes over output: you prefer a smaller, simpler solution that ships and works to a bigger thing that doesn't.
• End-to-end ownership: design, ship, operate, and improve.
• Curiosity about how financial markets work.
• Understanding of financial market data: order books, trades, reference data, portfolios, and exposures.

Nice to have

• Lakehouse experience with Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake.
• Familiarity with DataHub or similar metadata and lineage platforms.
• Rust experience or interest, particularly given that some of Keyrock's performance-critical services are written in it.

What we offer

• A from-scratch mandate as one of the first hires in the Central Data Team, shaping the platform, standards, and team culture.
• Strong working relationships with Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and the trading desks themselves.
• Flexible hours and remote-first work, with business-hours on-call shared across the team.
• A competitive salary package with various benefits.
• A collaborative team with regular online gatherings and a yearly in-person onsite.

About Keyrock

Keyrock is a leading market maker in digital assets, founded in 2017 and now operating across more than 80 trading venues. The company partners with 250+ team members across 42 nationalities, primarily remote with hubs in London, Brussels, and Singapore. Beyond market making, Keyrock offers options trading, high-frequency trading, OTC, and DeFi trading services, and is known for pioneering Rust in algorithmic trading, running an accelerator programme for Web3 startups, and contributing to research and governance in the digital asset industry.