Senior Data Engineer

As a Senior Data Engineer at Keyrock, you'll build the Central Data Platform that powers trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research across the company. You'll be one of the early hires in a newly formed Central Data Team, shaping the standards, architecture, and culture as you go. Your work will transform raw market, trading, and portfolio data into real-time insights that help traders, AI agents, and business teams act fast and autonomously.

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, 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, and self-healing.
• Build the derived analytics the business runs on: cross-exchange spreads, VWAP at depth, and order book microstructure for the desks; 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 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, with the ability to reason about what the database engine is doing 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.
• 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 ideally; TimescaleDB, QuestDB, or similar are fine), with the ability to discuss table design as a function of query patterns.
• Experience with lakehouse architecture, reasoning 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, where reprocessing is safe, retries don't double-write, and the system recovers without human intervention.
• Comfort with Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD as how you work, not as a separate "DevOps" function.
• You think about cost and performance early, instrument as you build, and design for data quality and governance up front with contracts, validation, lineage, and ownership.
• You reason from first principles on new problems, stay pragmatic on familiar ones, and update your view as you learn more.
• You treat trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research as customers of what you build.
• You optimise for outcomes over output, take ownership end-to-end, say what you think, and make the people around you better.
• You understand financial market data: order books, trades, reference data, portfolios, exposures. Experience with crypto, TradFi, or both is 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 interest; some of Keyrock's performance-critical services are written in it.

What we offer

• A from-scratch mandate. You'll be among the first hires in the Central Data Team, and the platform, standards, and team culture are yours to shape.
• Strong partners. Close working relationships with Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and the trading desks themselves.
• Autonomy on how you work: flexible hours, remote-first, business-hours on-call shared across the team.
• Competitive salary package with various benefits.
• A team that likes each other. Regular online get-togethers and a yearly onsite where everyone is in the same room.

About Keyrock

Keyrock is a leading market maker in the digital asset space, founded in 2017 and now operating across more than 80 trading venues. With 250+ team members across 42 nationalities spread across London, Brussels, Singapore, and remote-first operations, Keyrock spans market making, options trading, high-frequency trading, OTC, and DeFi trading. The company is a pioneer in adopting Rust for algorithmic trading and supports Web3 growth through its Accelerator Program while contributing to ecosystem research and governance initiatives.