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:

1. System Design & Architecture
2. Distributed Systems
3. Event-Driven Architectures
4. Multithreading & Concurrency
5. High-Performance Computing
6. Network Programming
7. Memory Management & Optimization
8. Performance Profiling & Latency Analysis

Domain Experience:

• Strong experience within Capital Markets, preferably FICC (Fixed Income, Currencies & Commodities).
• Experience working on:

1. Trading Platforms
2. Market Data Systems
3. Order Management & Execution Systems
4. Pricing & Risk Platforms
5. Low-Latency Transaction Processing Systems

• Understanding of Fixed Income products, trading workflows, market data, pricing and trade lifecycle processes.

Architecture & Leadership:

• 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.

To apply for this Senior Technical Lead / Architect job, please click the button below and submit your latest CV.

Job Reference: RL8209