Cricket Dev Team Lead

Mustard Systems is a team of 65 people dedicated to developing market leading sports models and trading strategies. Applications of our research are widespread across multiple sectors including betting, insurance, finance and the media, as well as giving advice to coaches and owners of sporting teams. Our aim is to predict sport as accurately as possible, and we achieve this by combining large, rapidly changing datasets with home grown software and statistical models. We enjoy a fast-paced, ever-changing environment, offering fresh challenges which are both rewarding and enjoyable. Our ambitions are high, aiming to create best-in-class systems in a highly competitive field. In the coming year, we will be working on expanding our trading strategies and data feeds.

We are looking for a hands-on Team Lead for our cricket development team, which develops and maintains our best-in-class cricket prediction software.

About the Team

Our Cricket Team look after Mustard’s best-in-class cricket prediction platform, and informs the placement of tens of thousands of bets every day across liquidity providers around the world. They look after:

• Managing simulation code across hundreds of CPUs to deliver match predictions to traders within seconds of every ball of every top level cricket match played worldwide.
• Enabling traders to dynamically adjust predictions based on expert insight and match conditions.
• Maintaining and expanding ETL pipelines, ingesting a vast internal dataset of global cricket matches.
• Continuously improving system performance to minimize reaction times from game events to actionable insights.

Our current team consists of one developer with 10+ years of experience, specializing in Python backend development. This will grow in 2025.

Key Responsibilities

As the Team Lead, you will:

• Strategic Planning & Collaboration
  • Work closely with Project Managers and Product Owners to scope and prioritize tasks, considering business goals, timelines, scalability, and maintainability.
  • Develop and communicate a long-term strategy to scale the number of matches we can trade concurrently, the number of predictions we can make per match, and to minimise our trading downtime.
  • Proactively identify and resolve roadblocks throughout the development cycle to ensure smooth, efficient delivery from design to deployment.
• Technical Leadership & Team Development
  • Be hands-on: take on tasks, actively solve problems and contribute to delivery.
  • Support developers on the team, ensuring they are stretched and work on tasks appropriate to their skill-level.
  • Anticipate potential technical challenges and devise proactive, effective solutions.
  • Lead architecture decisions that align with Mustard’s standards and ensure these are well understood across the team.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including developers, quants, and traders, to improve the effectiveness of our systems with a focus on flexibility, speed, and accuracy.

Our Core Tech Stack Tools: RabbitMQ and ZeroMQ for messaging; PostgreSQL for data storage; Websockets for frontend communication. Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Zabbix.

Requirements

Must-Haves:

• At least 5 years’ experience in a Software Development role, with solid Python expertise and a track record of building robust, high-quality solutions.
• At least 1 year in a leadership position, with a history of successfully guiding teams and projects to impactful outcomes.
• Experience in designing and sustaining technical solutions that pragmatically address complex, real-world business challenges.
• Clear and impactful communication skills, capable of translating intricate technical topics and business challenges into actionable insights.

Work on cutting-edge systems in a competitive and innovative field. Collaborate with a smart, driven team, where your contributions directly impact business performance. Opportunity to drive the company’s technical direction and double its revenue in the next three years. Competitive salary and significant bonus potential (up to 30%). Enhanced pension match with salary sacrifice option. Health insurance and life assurance. Sabbatical leave after five years. 33 days of annual leave (including bank holidays).

We have a hybrid working approach at Mustard Systems. We enjoy working and collaborating together and require people to be in our Hammersmith office three days a week. If you require any additional flexibility, please let our hiring team know as part of the recruitment process.