Senior Data Engineer

As a Senior Data Engineer at Keyrock, you join the Central Data Team, a newly formed group building the Keyrock Data Platform to deliver real-time data and context to trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research teams. You'll be one of the early hires shaping the team's standards, architecture, and culture from the ground up.

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 the data team.
• Own data contracts and schema evolution, keeping 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, including cross-exchange spreads, VWAP at depth, and order book microstructure for the 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: write things down and partner 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 understanding what the database engine does with your queries.
• Code that is 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 taken-for-granted standards 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, ideally ClickHouse; TimescaleDB, QuestDB, or similar are acceptable, with understanding of table design as a function of query patterns.
• Experience with a lakehouse architecture, reasoning about table layout, partitioning, and compaction as design choices that shape query performance and storage cost.
• Ability to build for self-healing and idempotency, ensuring reprocessing is safe, retries do not double-write, and the system recovers without human intervention.
• Comfort with Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD as standard practice, not separate "DevOps" work.
• A mindset to think about cost and performance early.
• Instinct to instrument as you build, making logs, metrics, and traces part of the system from day one.
• Ability to design for data quality and governance up front, covering contracts, validation, lineage, and ownership.
• First-principles reasoning on new problems, pragmatism on known ones, and willingness to update your view as you learn.
• Ability to treat trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research as customers of what you build, and communicate with them accordingly.
• Optimisation for outcomes over output: a smaller, simpler thing that ships and works beats a bigger thing that does not.
• End-to-end ownership: design, ship, operate, improve.
• Willingness to say what you think, including unpopular takes, and change your mind when the argument is better.
• Ability to make the people around you better: you write real reviews, juniors grow from working with you, and peers want to work with you again.
• Curiosity about how markets work; data engineering alone will not keep you interested here.
• Honesty about what you know and what you do not, and speed in closing the gap.
• Understanding of financial market data: order books, trades, reference data, portfolios, and exposures. Crypto, traditional finance, or both are strong advantages.

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 performance-critical services are written in it.

What we offer

• A from-scratch mandate: you will be among the first hires in CDT, and the platform, standards, and team culture are yours to shape.
• Strong partners through close working relationships with Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and the desks themselves.
• Autonomy on how you work: flexible hours, remote-first, and business-hours on-call shared across the team.
• A competitive salary package with various benefits.
• A team that enjoys working together, with regular online get-togethers and a yearly onsite.

About Keyrock

Since 2017, Keyrock has grown into a leading market maker in the digital asset space, operating on more than 80 trading venues and working with a wide range of asset issuers. Today, the company has over 250 team members across 42 nationalities, with hubs in London, Brussels, and Singapore. Keyrock's services span market making, options trading, high-frequency trading, OTC, and DeFi trading desks, and the company is renowned for pioneering Rust adoption in algorithmic trading, supporting Web3 startups through an Accelerator Program, and advancing industry research and governance.