Data Engineer (6 month contract)

Contract Data Engineer (JVM / Kotlin / Python)

6-month initial contract | Onsite (potential for hybrid)

An elite quantitative research and trading firm is looking for a Contract Data Engineer to join a Reference Data Engineering team supporting critical research and trading use cases.

This team owns complex financial market datasets that describe how markets are structured and behave, and plays a key role in ensuring high-quality, reliable data flows across the organisation.

What you'll be doing

• Owning and enhancing data pipelines that process large-scale financial market data

• Modernising existing data flows, upgrading legacy JVM-based pipelines into newer, cleaner architectures

• Remapping incoming datasets and rewriting ingestion and transformation pipelines

• Working across SQL Server, JVM applications, and Spark-based workloads

• Contributing improvements to data quality, performance, and maintainability

Tech environment

• Kotlin & Spring Boot for core data processing services

• Python for tooling and automation

• Legacy systems in C# and Scala / Spark

• Exposure to data lakes and large-scale data platforms is a strong plus

What they're looking for

• Strong JVM background (Kotlin, Java, or Scala)

• Experience building or modernising data pipelines

• Solid understanding of SQL and data processing systems

• Comfortable working in complex, performance-sensitive environments

• Financial markets or trading data experience is beneficial but not essential

6-month initial contract with potential to extend. Onsite by default, with some flexibility for hybrid working.

Happy to share more detail with interested candidates — drop me a message.