Lead Engineer Digital Assets

Our client is building an institutional-grade digital asset brokerage and execution platform from the ground up. They're looking for a hands-on engineering lead who can architect systems, write production code, and drive a team of engineers to deliver — not someone who has drifted away from the codebase.

The role owns the technical vision and delivery of the platform layer: the APIs, portals, and automation that institutional clients use across the trade lifecycle. This includes designing event-driven, straight-through processing pipelines that replace manual operations with scalable infrastructure, tightly integrated with execution, post-trade, custody, and market data systems.

The successful candidate will make real architectural calls — messaging topology, data persistence, build-vs-extend trade-offs — and back them up by shipping working systems. They'll embed intelligent automation (including LLM-driven agents) where it adds genuine operational leverage, and lead a cross-functional engineering team, setting standards and building reusable platform capabilities with long-term commercial value.

• 7+ years building trading or market infrastructure (OMS, execution, post-trade, or similar latency-aware, reliability-critical systems) in capital markets or fintech
• Deep hands-on expertise in .NET and/or C++, with experience operating high-throughput, low-latency systems
• Strong command of event-driven architecture — Kafka or equivalent, with design for idempotency, replay, and fan-out
• Production AWS experience, with informed decision-making on compute, networking, storage, and cost at scale
• Experience with tick databases/time-series data (kdb+/q, InfluxDB, Timescale DB, or similar)
• Proven ability to lead and grow an engineering team while staying close to the code and maintaining architectural credibility
• Strong product instinct in technical contexts, with comfort owning a roadmap and defending priorities
• A builder's mindset — prior experience digitising manual processes and driving automation
• Practical exposure to AI-assisted engineering and agentic workflows
• FIX protocol, OMS/EMS, or exchange connectivity experience is a strong plus, as is familiarity with crypto market structure, custody, or digital asset infrastructure

This is a ground-floor opportunity at an institutional platform holding an AFSL, with established vendor relationships across tier-one custody and execution counter parties, and a clear commercial mandate across digital assets and FX. It's a build, not a maintenance job — ideal for someone who wants to shape architecture, write code that matters, and lead engineers who do the same. I thought that season probably where we expected it would be you know they did