KDB Developer - Investment Banking - Contract or Perm - London

Job Description

KDB Developer - Investment Banking - Contract or Perm - London

Project description
We are seeking an experienced Senior KDB+ Developer to design, develop and optimize high performance data platforms built on kdb+. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in kdb+ tick architecture, performance tuning at scale and close collaboration with business stakeholder - particularly within Risk functions - to deliver robust, efficient and maintainable solutions.

Responsibilities
Design, develop and maintain kdb+ tick systems with strong understanding of data organization, schema design and the performance implications of different architectural approaches.
Build and operate solutions handling large scale, high frequency datasets, ensuring low latency, high throughput and efficient memory usage.
Analyze and optimize q queries, data models and ingestion pipelines for both Real Time and historical workloads.
Collaborate closely with Risk function teams to translate business requirements into efficient, scalable and performant code.
Drive continuous improvement through refactoring, performance benchmarking and adoption of best practices
Mentor and guide junior and mid-level developers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, code quality and knowledge sharing.
Participate in design reviews, production support and root cause analysis of complex system issues.
Work collaboratively within an Agile or iterative delivery environment, contributing to design, implementation, testing and release phases.

Skills

Must have
8+ years of hands on experience in kdb+ development in a production environment.
Strong expertise in q language including: table design (splayed, partitioned, segmented), In memory vs on disk trade offs, efficient joins, aggregation and windowed analytics
Deep understanding of kdb+ tick architecture including ticker plant, RDB, HDB and associated patterns
Proven experience working with large datasets and optimising queries for performance and scalability
Strong background in Unix/Linux environments, including Shell Scripting for automation, monitoring and operational tooling
Solid understanding of software delivery processes and methodologies (Agile, CI/CD, Version control, release)
Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, demonstrating systematic reasoning and problem solving skills

Nice to have
Knowledge of inter process communication mechanism in kdb+ and integration with external systems
Experience tuning kdb+ systems for low-latency and high availability
Familiarity with data quality checks, validation frameworks and operational resilience patterns
Exposure to financial markets data (market data, trading, risk, post-trade workflows, equity asset class)
passion for writing clean, efficient and well-structured code