Senior Data Engineer

As a Senior Data Engineer at Keyrock, you'll build the Keyrock Data Platform from the ground up. You'll be one of the early hires in the Central Data Team, shaping how data flows across the company to power trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research. This is a from-scratch mandate where the platform, standards, and team culture are still open for you to help define.

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 the 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, 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: stale-feed detection, schema validation, range checks, idempotent writes, lineage, ownership, self-healing.
• Build the derived analytics the business runs on: cross-exchange spreads, VWAP at depth, order book microstructure for the desks; portfolio views, exposure, 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, partner closely with Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and the rest of the 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 query engine is doing.
• 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 are taken seriously by default.
• Design and operational experience with 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 (ClickHouse ideally; TimescaleDB, QuestDB, or similar) and the ability to discuss table design as a function of query patterns.
• Experience with lakehouse architecture and the ability to reason about table layout, partitioning, and compaction as design choices that shape query performance and storage cost.
• Building for self-healing and idempotency: you understand reprocessing safety, retry logic, and systems that recover without human intervention.
• Comfort with Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD as part of your regular workflow, not a separate concern.
• An instinct to think about cost and performance early, and to instrument as you build with logs, metrics, and traces from day one.
• 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 the 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 an unpopular take, 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 you're 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. Some of the performance-critical services are written in it. Interest is welcome; fluency isn't required.

What we offer

• A from-scratch mandate. You'll be among the first hires in CDT, and the platform, the standards, and the team culture are yours to shape with us.
• Strong partners across Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and the desks themselves.
• Autonomy on how you work: flexible hours, remote-first, 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 is in the same room.

About Keyrock

Keyrock is a leading market maker in digital assets, trading on more than 80 venues globally. Founded in 2017, the company has grown to 250 team members across 42 nationalities, with hubs in London, Brussels, and Singapore. Keyrock offers market making, options trading, high-frequency trading, OTC, and DeFi trading services. The company is also a pioneer in Rust for algorithmic trading, runs an accelerator programme for Web3 startups, and contributes to liquidity and governance across DeFi, RWA, and NFT protocols.