Senior Java Engineer - Low Latency Systems Belfast, Northern Ireland | Hybrid
- Senior-level role building genuine exchange infrastructure … rare in the NI market
- Core Java stack: Aeron, Hydra, Kafka, FIX protocol, PostgreSQL
- Hybrid working from Belfast
- £ 90 - 110k per year
- Backed by two of the most respected names in global financial markets
About the Company
Our client is a next-generation prediction markets platform, built in partnership with two institutional heavyweights from the world of trading and finance. The platform operates like a professional exchange … enabling traders to take positions on real-world events and generating market-driven forecasts for leaders who need timely, reliable signals. This is a well-capitalised, mission-driven fintech with serious institutional backing and the technical ambition to build infrastructure that rivals the best in the industry.
The Role
This is a hands-on senior engineering role at the core of a high-performance exchange build. You will work closely with staff engineers to design and own significant components of a low-latency matching engine, order management system, and clearing infrastructure. It is the kind of technically deep, high-stakes work that is genuinely rare in the Belfast market, and the team is looking for someone who takes pride in the performance and reliability of systems that operate at scale. If you thrive on hard problems, move comfortably between deep execution and architectural input, and want to do the best work of your career close to home, this is worth a conversation.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and implement features across the matching engine, order management system, and clearing workflows
- Build ultra-low-latency messaging architecture using Aeron and Hydra frameworks
- Develop customer-facing API interfaces across FIX, REST, and WebSocket protocols
- Build fault-tolerant distributed systems using Kafka for event streaming and PostgreSQL for persistent state
- Contribute to architectural and technical design discussions alongside staff-level engineers
- Translate product and business requirements into production-quality technical implementations
- Continuously improve system performance, reliability, and observability
- Participate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents with deep technical troubleshooting
What You'll Need
Essential
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time spent on high-performance or distributed systems
- Strong Java proficiency including concurrency, JVM internals, memory management, and performance optimisation
- Proven experience building systems operating at high throughput and low latency in production (10,000+ messages per second, low-millisecond latency)
- Experience with Kafka and PostgreSQL in a production microservices environment
- Solid understanding of network protocols with hands-on REST and WebSocket API experience
- Right to work in the United Kingdom … no visa sponsorship available
Nice to have
- Experience with Aeron, Hydra, or comparable low-latency messaging frameworks
- FIX protocol experience
- Background in financial markets, exchange technology, or derivative instruments
Why Apply?
- £ 90-110kbase salary
- Hybrid working from Belfast
Private health, dental, and vision cover
- Access to institutional-grade trading infrastructure … the kind of system most engineers only read about
- Ground-floor opportunity in a well-backed fintech that is building something genuinely new
To Apply
Send your CV to Ryan Quinn or connect with Ryan Quinn on LinkedIn. We are happy to have a confidential conversation before you decide whether to apply formally.
