Senior KDB+ Developer in Woking

Location: London, UK (Hybrid)

Job Type: Contract - Inside IR35

Role Overview

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 stakeholders particularly within Risk functions to deliver robust, efficient, and maintainable solutions. This role also includes technical leadership, mentoring junior developers, and promoting best practices across the team.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain kdb+ tick systems, with strong understanding of data organisation, schema design, and 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.
• Analyse and optimise 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 kdb+ solutions.
• Take ownership of performance diagnostics, including CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network considerations across kdb+ processes.
• Develop robust and reusable q libraries, utilities, and frameworks with a strong focus on clean, maintainable, 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.

Required Skills & Experience

• 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, aggregations, 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 management).
• Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, demonstrating systematic reasoning and problem-solving skills.

Desirable / Nice-to-Have Skills

• Knowledge of inter-process communication mechanisms 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 (e.g., market data, trading, risk, or post-trade workflows, equity asset class).

Personal Attributes

• Passion for writing clean, efficient, and well-structured code.
• Proactive mindset with a strong focus on continuous improvement.
• Comfortable taking ownership and working independently on complex technical problems.
• Collaborative team player who enjoys mentoring others and raising overall technical standards.