Software Engineer / Tech Lead

Passively Looking

System Architect / Principal / Tech Lead Belfast City Centre, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom

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Summary

I'm a software engineer specializing in market data systems, with nearly a decade of experience building kdb+ applications that help trading desks and researchers access and analyze market data efficiently.
I started in financial technology in 2016 working for a fintech consultancy, where I learned kdb+ and worked on market data platforms for investment banks. That experience set the direction for my career - I found I really enjoyed the challenge of building systems that handle high-volume data streams and need to be both fast and reliable.
Over the years, I've worked across different firms and use cases. As a contractor, I worked with US hedge funds and investment banks, building real-time market data applications, data warehouses for securitized products, and FX trading infrastructure. At a major UK bank, I moved into systematic trading, designing data platforms that support quantitative research and algorithmic trading. The work involved everything from building feed handlers to creating research environments where quants could backtest their models.
More recently, I've taken on architecture and team leadership responsibilities at a market data technology company. I've been building cloud-native feed handlers that ingest market data from major providers, focusing on making systems scalable, fault-tolerant, and low-latency. I've also been establishing engineering practices - CI/CD pipelines, coding standards, that sort of thing - to help teams work more effectively.
While kdb+ is my primary tool, I work with whatever makes sense for the problem - Java, Python, C++, Rust. I've written plugins to extend kdb+ when needed and built integration layers between different systems. Outside work hours, I've picked up AWS certifications.