Lead Engineer – Greenfield Execution Platform - Systematic Quantitative Fund · London - Up to £550k TC

Lead Engineer – Greenfield Execution Platform - Systematic Quantitative Fund · London - Up to £550k TC

Greenfield builds at this level don't come around often. When they do, they tend to go to someone already inside the firm, or get scoped down before they reach the market. This one is real, it's open, and the mandate is as clean as it sounds.

A systematic quantitative fund, one that thinks of engineering as a core competitive advantage, not a support function, is building its execution front-end from scratch. No legacy codebase to work around. No inherited architecture to defend. A blank canvas, a senior team to collaborate with, and direct line of sight to the desk that will use what you build every day.

What You're Building

The platform is the trading desk's live operational cockpit, the system through which execution decisions are made, monitored, and controlled in real markets. If that sounds like meaningful work, it's because it is.

Specifically:

• Real-Time Execution Monitoring Systems that track the full order lifecycle as it happens: venue and router performance, slippage, rejects, fill quality, anomalies. The challenge isn't just capturing the data; it's surfacing the right signal at the right moment, fast enough to be genuinely useful when a desk is live.
• Control Plane & Operational Infrastructure Workflows, guardrails, permissions, audit trails, safe-to-trade checks. The layer the desk depends on when something unexpected happens. Robustness and predictability here aren't nice-to-haves, they're the whole point.
• State Management & Reconciliation The deceptively hard problem at the centre of any live trading system: what is actually true right now? Not what was true a moment ago, not what the system intended, but what is true. Designing for that consistently, under load, in production, is one of the more demanding problems in financial engineering.
• Desk-Facing UI Fast, intuitive interfaces built for people making high-stakes decisions in real time. A slow render or an ambiguous data state has consequences in this environment. The UI needs to be as robust as the systems underneath it.

The Stack

The backend is primarily C#, with the emphasis on distributed, event-driven, high-throughput systems built for production rather than demonstration. The frontend is React, built for performance and clarity in a real-time trading environment.

That said, the firm is genuinely open on both sides. We consider strong engineers from Java, Go, or other typed backend languages. The language matters less than the depth of thinking around concurrency, async patterns, and system design under pressure. On the frontend, experience with Angular, Vue, or similar frameworks translates well; the important thing is an instinct for performant, high-clarity UI, not a specific framework.

If you're a strong backend engineer who's worked primarily in one language and are open to moving, that's a conversation worth having. If you're full-stack and have touched trading systems, execution infrastructure, or real-time data products, this was probably written for you.

What They're Looking For

• Senior engineers with strong fundamentals in distributed or event-driven systems
• Production experience: systems you've built that have run under real conditions, not just looked good in review
• Comfort with ambiguity and the judgment to make architectural calls without constant sign-off
• Some exposure to trading, execution, market data, or real-time financial systems; this doesn't have to be deep, but the domain context matters
• Full-stack capability is ideal; exceptional engineers who lean strongly one way are still considered

Why This Over What You're Doing Now

Most senior engineering roles at this compensation level come with a matrix organisation, a large existing codebase, and a slow feedback loop between what you build and whether it matters. This one doesn't.

You'll own the architecture, ship it into production, and see the desk use what you build. The fund is established, the backing is real, and the greenfield mandate is genuine. If the combination of serious technical challenge, real ownership, and remote flexibility is what you've been waiting for, this is worth your time.