Aquis Exchange on cord

Aquis Exchange

Senior Rapid Application Engineer

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Aquis Exchange?
Finance · FinTech
Tomorrow's markets, today.
Posted
4 days ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Back End
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: Linux, Git, SQL, Python
Other skills considered: CI/CD, Kanban, Automated Testing

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

In this role you will be working with the Product, Infrastructure, QA, and Operations teams to solve complex problems at speed. Unlike our Low Latency team who build the exchange engine itself, the RAD (Rapid Application Development) team lives at the intersection of troubleshooting, innovation, and operational efficiency. You'll be investigating the toughest production issues, validating new trading technology approaches through rapid prototyping, and building the internal tools and test frameworks that keep Aquis running smoothly.

You'll be part of a small, high-impact team that combines detective work with creative engineering. One day you'll be diagnosing an intermittent issue in how we handle high-volume order processing; the next, you'll be building a POC for a new trading feature or designing a performance test suite that simulates real market stress. You thrive in environments where problems are ambiguous, priorities shift quickly, and your ability to communicate findings clearly to non-technical teams (QA, Product, Sales) is as important as the code you write.

To succeed as a Senior RAD Engineer, you will be a proponent of agile principles and modern software best practices. You can produce detailed technical work in OOP and collaborate effectively with other development teams to produce code of high quality. Ideally, you will have worked in critical systems development and have direct experience investigating and resolving production issues in high-performance environments. You should be comfortable with operational thinking, understanding not just what systems do, but why they fail and how to prevent it.


Responsibilities

Lead rapid prototyping and validation efforts: Design and implement proof-of-concept solutions for new trading algorithms and system approaches, with emphasis on speed-to-market and iterative feedback from stakeholders.

Drive troubleshooting investigations: Investigate complex production issues, performance anomalies, and system failures; establish reproducible test cases and diagnostic harnesses to validate root causes; communicate findings clearly to non-technical teams and document root causes for the broader engineering team.

Build internal tools and frameworks: Develop tools that improve operational efficiency, such as test suites, performance benchmarking frameworks, reproduction environments, diagnostic utilities, and internal dashboards that enable Ops and QA teams to resolve issues faster and validate fixes reliably.

Mentor mid-level RAD engineers: Provide technical guidance and code review for junior team members; help escalate issues appropriately and develop their investigative and prototyping skills.

Establish and maintain RAD engineering standards: Champion best practices for MVP development, testing, deployment automation, and documentation; ensure RAD-produced code meets security and reliability standards despite the emphasis on speed.

Apply deep technical analysis: Use computer science principles, engineering techniques, and mathematical analysis to break down complex problems in trading technology, market data flows, and system performance.

Participate as a Subject Matter Expert: Review and advise on software components, system designs, and architectural decisions; act as the voice of operational realities in engineering discussions.


Skills and Experience


Essential

  • 10+ years professional development experience with C++11 or later, building performant, scalable applications in production environments.
  • 6+ years hands-on experience with networking fundamentals (UDP, multicast, TCP, etc.), messaging systems, and algorithmic problem-solving.
  • 6+ years working on Linux systems, including kernel concepts, system tuning, and debugging tools (gdb, strace, perf, etc.).
  • Linux systems and debugging: Comfortable with system-level investigation and performance analysis.
  • Proven troubleshooting and investigative skills: Demonstrated ability to diagnose complex issues in production systems, whether via logs, memory dumps, or instrumentation, and communicate findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Expert in creating reproducible test cases: Skilled at building reliable test environments, isolating issues, and creating frameworks that help others validate fixes and prevent regressions.
  • Strong understanding of modern development best practices: Continuous integration, automated testing, code review discipline, and version control workflows.
  • Kanban and CI/CD: Comfortable with Kanban workflow, continuous integration, Jira, and rapid iteration cycles.
  • Git and version control: Professional-grade proficiency.
  • SQL: Ability to query and analyse data from our systems.
  • Experience delivering under time pressure: Ability to prioritize effectively, ship MVPs quickly, and iterate based on feedback without perfectionism compromising progress.
  • Proficient with AI tools in development: Comfortable using LLMs, coding assistants, and AI-powered tools to enhance productivity, debug code, generate documentation, and solve problems faster.

Desired

  • Python development proficiency: Strong ability to write automation scripts, diagnostic tools, and performance analysis scripts in Python.
  • Shell scripting (Bash): For system-level automation and analysis.
  • Performance analysis and optimization: Experience with profiling tools (perf, flame graphs, etc.) and track record of identifying and fixing performance bottlenecks.
  • Experience building test infrastructure: Previous work on test frameworks, load testing suites, or performance benchmarking systems.
  • Capital markets knowledge: Familiarity with exchange technology, FIX protocols, market data formats, or trading workflows.
  • Docker/containerization basics: Growing relevance for deployment and testing.
  • QuestDB or Dolt: Time-series or version-controlled database experience.

Mindset and Methodology

  • Operational mindset: You think about systems not just from a code perspective, but from "how will this be operated and what could go wrong?" You understand that production incidents are learning opportunities.
  • Comfortable with ambiguity: RAD work often starts without a clear specification. You're skilled at gathering requirements, validating assumptions, and delivering value incrementally.
  • Strong communicator: You can explain technical findings to non-technical stakeholders without dumbing down the substance. Your diagrams, summaries, and postmortems help the whole organization learn.
  • Excellent team player: You collaborate across silos (Product, Infrastructure, Ops) and help other teams succeed, not just your own.
  • Autonomous yet collaborative: You drive investigations independently but escalate proactively when needed. You know when to ask for help and when to dig deeper.
  • Delivers incrementally: You ship fast and iterate. You understand that a 70% solution delivered today is often better than a perfect solution delivered next month. You recognize that validation and feedback drive better outcomes than endless upfront planning.
  • Drive to solve complex problems: Above all, you're energized by the challenge of diagnosing the difficult bugs and building tools that make the platform more reliable and efficient.
Senior Rapid Application Engineer at Aquis Exchange
Position posted 4 days ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
Alex Yeates on cord
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