Staff java developer

Staff Java / C++ Engineer (Low Latency)

Belfast, Northern Ireland (Hybrid – onsite Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays)

Salary: Up to £120K + benefits

About the Company

Our client is building a premier prediction market platform in partnership with two of the most respected names in financial services. Operating at the frontier of financial technology, the business harnesses the scale and power of markets to produce timely, unique, and effective information discovery for leaders and decision makers. By empowering traders to take positions on the events that shape our world, the platform generates market‑driven forecasts that turn intuition into insight. This is financial technology at its most ambitious.

The Role

This is a senior, hands‑on engineering position driving the evolution of low‑latency, high‑throughput exchange and clearing systems. You will help architect and scale core infrastructure, ensuring microsecond‑level precision, financial integrity, and platform reliability at scale. It is designed for a technical leader who thrives on solving genuinely hard problems in financial markets and can operate across system design, performance engineering, and cross‑functional collaboration.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, implement, and maintain core exchange and clearing infrastructure, ensuring the system is performant, scalable, and ultra‑reliable.
• Provide technical leadership across system design patterns, frameworks, protocols, and data architectures.
• Utilise Aeron and Hydra frameworks to build ultra‑low‑latency and high‑throughput messaging architectures.
• Handle massive data volumes efficiently, designing storage and retrieval patterns for market data, trade history, positions, and audit trails.
• Collaborate with the Product team to design technical solutions for innovative financial products.
• Participate in on‑call rotations and respond to production incidents requiring deep technical troubleshooting.

Essential Criteria

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time in high‑performance, low‑latency distributed systems.
• Expert‑level Java proficiency, including deep knowledge of concurrency, memory management, JVM internals, and performance optimisation.
• Experience with Hydra, Aeron, or equivalent low‑latency messaging frameworks.
• Proven track record building systems handling 100k+ msgs/sec throughput, sub‑millisecond p99 latency, and 99.99%+ uptime.
• Experience with financial markets technology, including order books, matching algorithms, and derivatives products.

Why Join

This is a rare opportunity to work on genuinely complex, high‑stakes financial technology at a company backed by household names in the industry. You will have direct influence on architecture decisions, work with a world‑class engineering team, and build systems that matter.

Benefits

The business offers a comprehensive benefits package including pension contribution, private health cover, and generous annual leave.

Requirements

Applicants must be authorised to work in the UK on a permanent, indefinite basis.