Senior Technical Lead / Architect (Contract)
Start Date: August/September
Location: London 3 days pw, rest remote
IR35: Outside
Rate: £900pd (negotiable)
Duration: 3-6 Months (likely extensions)
The Candidate: Our client is seeking a highly experienced Senior Technical Lead/Architect with deep expertise in C programming and extensive experience building, enhancing, and modernizing trading platforms within Fixed Income, Currencies, and Commodities (FICC) environments. The ideal candidate combines strong hands‑on engineering capability with architecture leadership, system design expertise, and a proven track record of optimizing high‑performance, low‑latency applications used by front‑office trading businesses. This role will drive technical strategy, architecture decisions, platform modernization, performance tuning, and engineering excellence across mission‑critical trading systems.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead architecture, design, and development of complex trading and market‑facing platforms.
- Define system architecture, scalability, resilience, and performance strategies for business‑critical applications.
- Drive modernization of legacy trading systems while ensuring business continuity and platform stability.
- Partner with traders, quants, business stakeholders, and engineering teams to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions.
- Lead performance engineering initiatives including latency reduction, capacity optimization, memory management, and concurrency design.
- Establish engineering standards, architecture principles, design reviews, and code quality practices.
- Mentor senior developers and provide technical leadership across distributed teams.
- Support production stability, root‑cause analysis, and continuous platform improvement initiatives.
Technical Expertise:
- Strong hands‑on development experience in C (mandatory).
- Strong experience in C++ and/or C# (preferred).
- Deep understanding of:
- System Design & Architecture
- Distributed Systems
- Event‑Driven Architectures
- Multithreading & Concurrency
- High‑Performance Computing
- Network Programming
- Memory Management & Optimization
- Performance Profiling & Latency Analysis
Domain Experience:
- Strong experience within Capital Markets, preferably FICC (Fixed Income, Currencies & Commodities).
- Experience working on:
- Understanding of Fixed Income products, trading workflows, market data, pricing and trade lifecycle processes.
- Proven experience leading architecture and design discussions.
- Experience defining scalable, resilient, and fault‑tolerant solutions.
- Ability to drive platform modernization and technical transformation initiatives.
- Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with low‑latency or high‑frequency trading environments.
- Exposure to legacy platform modernization and re‑engineering programs.
- Experience with Windows and Linux/Unix environments.
- Knowledge of messaging technologies, real‑time data distribution, and event streaming.
- Familiarity with Cloud, Containers, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps practices.
- Experience working directly with traders, quantitative teams, and front‑office technology organizations.
Senior Technical Lead / Architect (Contract) employer: Curo Resourcing Ltd.
Curo Resourcing Ltd. is an excellent employer that values its employees by offering a flexible hybrid work model, allowing for a balance between remote work and on-site collaboration in the vibrant town of Poole. With a strong focus on professional development, employees are encouraged to grow their skills in a supportive environment that prioritises teamwork and compliance. The company fosters a culture of respect and inclusivity, making it a rewarding place for HR professionals to thrive.
