Software Developer

The Firm 

XTX Markets is an algorithmic trading firm that actively trades tens of thousands of instruments on over eighty venues with a daily volume of almost three hundred billion USD. We partner with counterparties, exchanges, and e-trading venues globally to provide consistent liquidity in the Equity, FX, Fixed Income, Commodity & Options markets, helping market participants throughout the world obtain the best prices in the various assets classes we cover. 

We leverage the talent of the people who work here, modern computational techniques and state-of-the-art research infrastructure to analyse large data sets across markets quickly and efficiently, to maximise the effectiveness of our proprietary trading algorithms. The models that drive our trading strategies have evolved considerably over the last 10 years, from econometric methods that gave our company its name, to trees, to neural networks, to modern deep learning architectures. We are actively seeking new methods and ideas. 

At XTX Markets technology is our business and we are a diverse organisation which attracts outstanding talent from across all industry backgrounds. We are focused on teamwork and our people collaborate on all aspects of the business, working openly and with respect for each other, our clients and the market. Our culture is non-hierarchical and one where everyone is valued. We strive for excellence in everything we do. 

The Role  

The Shared Engineering team at XTX Markets designs, develops and maintains infrastructure used by the rest of the firm using a combination of commercial products, open source software and custom code. 

This role is ideal for someone who is well organised, pragmatic and possesses the skills to program tools and systems via concise and efficient code. Ideally you would possess a good scientific degree from a respected institution or equivalent industry experience.  

Some examples of the products we develop and maintain are:  

• An in-house job scheduling system. 
• An in-house monitoring system, including metrics collection and visualisation. 
• Network automation and configuration management tooling. 
• Custom Kerberos infrastructure and related tools. 
• Standardised open-source and in-house Linux distributions. 
• A central host configuration database with integrations to purchasing and finance systems. 

In addition, we operate the underlying infrastructure (networks, servers and storage) relied on by other teams, including those developing post-trade and low-latency OTC trading systems.  

Responsibilities

• Design, develop and continually improve the platforms that enable other teams to easily interface with and use our infrastructure. 
• Reduce manual activities by automating complex processes involving multiple systems, some without formal APIs. 
• Define standards to reduce duplication of effort across the company and consult with other technologist to promote re-use. 
• Mentoring other team members, enabling them to support and maintain the systems you develop. 
• Evaluate modern technology and development techniques, figuring out how they are applicable to the company. 
• Maintain the current infrastructure and tooling where it makes sense to do so. 
• Contribute to commercial discussions where third-party systems are involved. 
• Support of our systems and infrastructure on which other teams rely.  

Essential Attributes 

• You should be able to demonstrate practical experience of automation, showing how you introduced new tools which had a positive impact and were used by a wider community of users than just your immediate team. 
• We primarily use Go for our systems, but also Python, C and Bash where appropriate. While experience in these is not necessary, you must be able to code fluently in some programming language and be willing and able to quickly adopt new languages as necessary. 
• A good working knowledge of Linux, TCP/IP networking, and storage technologies. 
• Evidence of building excellent relationships with peers both inside a team and across an organisation. 
• Expert use of standard development tools such as git, IDEs, CI/CD and test-driven development techniques. 
• Working at the CLI should be second nature to you. 

Desirable Attributes  

Some knowledge of a subset of these technologies would be preferred although we do not expect full in-depth expertise. More interestingly it gives some idea of the wide range of technologies we work with: 

• Containerisation technologies such as Docker or Podman. 
• Observability infrastructure, e.g. Victoria Metrics, Prometheus, Grafana. 
• Large scale logging tools, e.g. Logstash, Kibana, Graylog, Elasticsearch. 
• Configuration management techniques using Puppet, Terraform or even just Bash. 
• Working knowledge of hardware, operating system, networking and/or storage systems, e.g. Debian, Red Hat, VMware, Cisco, NetApp, ZFS. 
• Knowledge of trading systems, particularly with regards to exchange and counterparty connectivity and precise timing infrastructure. 

 
Benefits 

• Onsite gym, sauna, and fitness classes at no charge.
• Extensive medical benefits including an on-site doctor and therapist at no charge.
• Breakfast and lunch provided daily.
• Various supports for caregivers, including emergency dependent care.
• Beautiful Kings Cross office: https://vimeo.com/257888726
• 25 days paid holiday per year + statutory holiday and paid sick days.
• Generous pension contributions.