Job purpose
We are looking for a contract Backend Engineer to help build and refine analytical, data-driven web applications
and supporting infrastructure for a quantitative trading firm. This role is hands-on and implementation-driven,
working with production microservices, databases, and automated workflows.
Key responsibilities
- Build and upgrade microservices and workflows written in Python/Pandas
- Design and maintain RESTful APIs that serve time-series and quantitative data
- Integrate with database storage across MongoDB, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL
- Reason about business logic as it relates to backend data transformations
- Collaborate with front-end developers to design APIs that provide the necessary data to the UI
- Make informed decisions about where certain pieces of business logic belong in the stack
- Optimize query performance for large datasets and frequent updates
- Debug issues related to job dependency management and data integrity
- Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines for backend services
- Ensure system reliability through monitoring, logging, and alerting
Key competencies
Required Skills
- Strong experience with Python (3.9+) and data manipulation libraries (Pandas, NumPy)
- Proficiency building microservices using FastAPI or similar async frameworks
- Solid understanding of enterprise-level data architecture and design patterns
- Experience with both relational (SQL Server, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB) databases
- Good understanding of SQL Server stored procedures with the ability to alter or create them as
needed
- Working knowledge of containers (Docker) and cloud platforms (GCP/Kubernetes)
- Experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs collaboratively with UI developers
- Strong grasp of software engineering fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and design
patterns
- Knowledge of code performance optimization and memory efficiency
- Familiarity with message brokers and event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Pub/Sub)
- Experience with version control (Git) including branching strategies, code reviews, and PR workflows
- Understanding of authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth2, JWT, API keys)
- Ability to work independently within an existing, complex codebase
- Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills in distributed systems
Nice to Have
- Experience with financial, trading, or analytical applications
- Full proficiency handling time-series data as well as streaming/real-time data
- Familiarity with market data from industry vendors such as Bloomberg, Factset, or Refinitiv
- Experience with task scheduling and orchestration tools (Airflow, Prefect, or similar)
- Focus on software testing and validation, including unit, integration, and performance testing
- Knowledge of caching strategies (Redis, Memcached) for high-throughput systems
- Exposure to infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Helm, Kustomize)
- Experience with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, or similar)
