Rust Developer

FULLY REMOTE | £850/D RATE (6 MONTH CONTRACT)

About the Company

Our client is a globally leading liquidity provider in energy derivatives, trading significant notional value annually across commodity and energy markets. Operating through multiple divisions spanning trading, market data, and technology, the firm sets the standard in key energy benchmarks. This is not a bank or a hedge fund - it is a technology-driven market-making powerhouse at the intersection of global energy markets, data, and engineering - and it is growing fast.

Engineering Culture

This firm does not hire passengers - it hires pilots. Every engineer takes ownership, pushes back when the design is not right, and holds the bar high without being asked. The team practises TDD, designs for observability from day one, and treats software craftsmanship as a genuine competitive advantage. The team is small, senior, and embedded directly on the trading floor. There are no layers of abstraction between you and the business - your work has immediate, measurable impact from day one.

The Opportunity

Most engineers spend their careers a long way from systems that actually matter. In this role, you will build the infrastructure that sits between traders and the market - execution paths, data pipelines, and observability tooling that power significant volumes in annual notional trading. When a system performs at 3am under peak load, you will be one of the reasons why. This is a rare opportunity to apply Rust in a domain where performance directly changes outcomes, and where your engineering decisions carry real commercial weight.

Requirements

• 5-10 years software engineering; 3+ years production Rust - ownership, lifetimes, and async model are instincts, not references
• Tokio and the broader async Rust ecosystem; concurrent, lock-free, and wait-free data structures in live systems
• Low-latency system design; hot path optimisation, benchmarking, and hardware-level profiling - cache topology, NUMA effects, allocator behaviour
• Custom allocator design, unsafe code review, and rigorous reasoning about memory safety at system boundaries
• High-performance network programming: TCP/UDP, zero-copy I/O, kernel bypass awareness (DPDK, io_uring)
• Distributed messaging and event streaming: Kafka, NATS, or equivalent; ordering guarantees, exactly-once semantics, consumer group management
• Production observability: metrics (Prometheus/OpenTelemetry), distributed tracing, structured logging, and alert design
• CI/CD pipeline design including benchmarking gates, automated performance regression detection, and reproducible builds
• TDD as a design discipline - property-based testing, integration tests, chaos and fault injection experience
• Ability to lead architecture design reviews, author ADRs, and elevate Rust engineering standards across a team
• Cloud infrastructure - Azure preferred, AWS considered; IAM, managed services, automated and auditable deployment pipelines, secrets management

Nice to Have

• Front office trading environment (any asset class) - execution systems, market data infrastructure, or low-latency pricing engines
• FIX protocol, OMS/EMS connectivity, or direct exchange co-location experience
• SIMD, vectorisation, or GPU offloading for numerical workloads; eBPF for observability or network instrumentation
• Open-source Rust contributions, published crates, or ring-buffer/LMAX Disruptor pattern experience

What We're Looking For

You find the bottleneck before anyone reports it, understand it at the hardware level, and instrument the fix so the next problem surfaces in seconds. You write Rust other engineers learn from and care deeply whether a system is correct - not because a spec says so, but because you know what happens when it is not. In this environment, that moment has a cost. You are the reason it does not happen.