Senior Data Engineer

As a Senior Data Engineer at Keyrock, you'll be among the first hires in the Central Data Team, building the Keyrock Data Platform from the ground up. This platform will give traders, AI agents, and teams across the company the data and context they need to act fast and autonomously. You'll shape the standards, architecture, and culture of a new team while serving critical functions: trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research.

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 does with your queries.
• Code that's easy for someone else to read, test, and delete later.
• A strong understanding of data modelling for both streaming and analytical workloads.
• Default focus on efficiency, quality, idempotency, and observability.
• Design and operation of 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 also fine), including understanding 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.
• You build for self-healing and idempotency: reprocessing is safe, retries don't double-write, and the system recovers without human intervention.
• Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD are how you work, not a separate "DevOps" concern.
• You think about cost and performance early.
• You instrument as you build: logs, metrics, and traces are part of the system from day one.
• You 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.
• 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're direct about what you think, including unpopular takes, 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 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 experience. Some performance-critical services are written in it; interest is welcome, fluency isn't required.

What we offer

• A from-scratch mandate to shape the platform, standards, and team culture.
• Close working relationships with Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and the trading desks themselves.
• Autonomy on how you work: flexible hours, remote-first, shared business-hours on-call across the team.
• A competitive salary package with various benefits.
• 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, founded in 2017 and now operating across more than 80 trading venues. With 250+ team members across 42 nationalities and hubs in London, Brussels, and Singapore, Keyrock spans market making, options trading, high-frequency trading, OTC, and DeFi trading. The company is known for pioneering Rust adoption in algorithmic trading, running an Accelerator Program for Web3 startups, and providing liquidity to DeFi, RWA, and NFT protocols.