Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – FX Trading Systems

Immediate availability preferred

Role Summary

Wagglyn is seeking a hands-on Chief Technology Officer to take full ownership of our trading technology platform as we move into production.

This is an end-to-end role: from architecture and system design through to live operation and continuous optimisation. You will be responsible for building, scaling, and operating a low-latency FX trading platform in a production environment.

We are looking for an experienced operator - not a pure architect - who has built and run trading systems under real market conditions and is comfortable taking full accountability for outcomes.

You will join a small, high-performance team with a clear mandate to deliver institutional-grade trading infrastructure from the ground up.

Responsibilities

System Ownership

• Own end-to-end architecture across trading systems, from execution layer through to infrastructure and data platforms
• Ensure systems are robust, performant, and production-ready from day one
• Take full responsibility for reliability, latency, and operational stability in live trading environments

Trading Infrastructure

• Design and operate execution systems, market data pipelines, and connectivity to FX ECNs and trading venues
• Oversee FIX session architecture, order entry workflows, and post-trade flows
• Build multi-venue, connector-based trading infrastructure

Platform & Infrastructure

• Define architecture for data ingestion, storage, and processing, including QuestDB and PostgreSQL
• Own Linux-based systems architecture, performance tuning, and infrastructure design
• Design for resilience: failover, recovery, retry logic, and observability
• Ensure secure, production-grade infrastructure including backups and business continuity

Team & Engineering Standards

• Build and lead a high-performance engineering team (target 2–5 engineers)
• Set engineering standards across performance, reliability, security, and release discipline
• Establish clear separation between hot path and control plane in system design

Required Experience

FX Trading Systems (Essential)

• Direct experience building and operating trading systems in electronic FX markets
• Strong understanding of market data, execution, order lifecycle, and real-time trading constraints
• Prior experience in a hedge fund, proprietary trading firm, or startup trading environment

Low Latency Engineering

• Deep expertise in Rust and C++ systems design for performance-critical environments
• Experience building low-latency distributed systems with efficient inter-process communication
• Strong understanding of concurrency, shared-memory IPC, and performance optimisation

Systems & Networking

• Linux specialist with strong knowledge of systems and network performance
• Deep network-aware systems thinking, including latency implications of routing, switches, and cross-host communication

Architecture & Reliability

• Strong knowledge of FIX protocols and trading workflows
• Proven experience designing resilient systems with failover, recovery, and monitoring

Communication & Engineering Discipline

• Effective communicator, able to work across engineering, quantitative, and business stakeholders
• Strong discipline around maintaining accurate, up-to-date codebases, documentation, and data schemas

Preferred Experience

• Experience building trading platforms from early-stage through to production scale
• Ability to bring or rapidly assemble a high-quality engineering team
• Familiarity with hardware-level optimisation (e.g. NUMA, kernel bypass, FPGA)

Profile

• Hands-on operator with full ownership mindset
• Comfortable working in a small, high-accountability environment
• Pragmatic and delivery-focused, with strong attention to system integrity
• Calm and effective under production pressur e

Location

• Remote (global candidates considered).

Compensation

• Competitive and aligned with senior technology leadership roles in electronic trading.

About Wagglyn

Wagglyn is a bespoke FX consultancy mandated by a single family office to develop and implement a systematic total return strategy in foreign exchange markets.

We design and deliver institutional-grade algorithmic FX trading systems and supporting infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions.

We are a small, research-driven team building a dedicated quantitative FX trading capability from the ground up.