Senior Data Engineer

As a Senior Data Engineer at Keyrock, you will build the Keyrock Data Platform from the ground up. The Central Data Team is only a few months old, and you'll be one of the early hires shaping the standards, architecture, and culture. You'll give trading desks, wealth and asset management, product, risk, finance, compliance, and research teams the data and context they need to 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 the data team.
• Own data contracts and schema evolution to keep 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, including stale-feed detection, schema validation, range checks, idempotent writes, lineage, ownership, and self-healing capabilities.
• 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 by writing things down and partnering 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 the ability to reason about what the query engine is doing.
• A track record of writing code that is easy for others 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 preferred; TimescaleDB, QuestDB, or similar are acceptable) 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.
• The ability to build for self-healing and idempotency: reprocessing is safe, retries do not double-write, and the system recovers without human intervention.
• Proficiency with Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD as your standard working method.
• A habit of thinking about cost and performance early in design.
• A commitment to instrumenting as you build, with logs, metrics, and traces as part of the system from day one.
• An understanding of data quality and governance, including contracts, validation, lineage, and ownership.
• The 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 and communicate with them accordingly.
• A preference for outcomes over output: shipping a smaller, simpler thing that works over a bigger thing that does not.
• Ownership across the full cycle: design, ship, operate, improve.
• Willingness to say what you think, including unpopular takes, and to change your mind when the argument is better.
• The ability to make people around you better through real reviews, helping juniors grow, and being someone peers want to work with again.
• Curiosity about how markets work. Data engineering alone will not keep you interested at Keyrock.
• Honesty about what you know and what you do not, and speed in closing gaps.
• An understanding of financial market data: order books, trades, reference data, portfolios, and exposures. Experience in crypto, traditional finance, 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 performance-critical services are written in Rust; fluency is not required.

What we offer

• A from-scratch mandate to shape the platform, standards, and team culture alongside early hires in the Central Data Team.
• Strong partnerships with Architecture, Infrastructure, Platform, and the trading desks themselves.
• Autonomy on how you work, with flexible hours, remote-first operations, and shared business-hours on-call 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

Since 2017, Keyrock has grown to be a leading market maker in the digital asset space, partnering with over 250 team members across 42 nationalities. The company trades on more than 80 venues and operates market making, options trading, high-frequency trading, OTC, and DeFi trading desks. Keyrock is pioneering the use of Rust for algorithmic trading, supports Web3 startups through its Accelerator Program, and drives industry progress through research and governance initiatives.