Java / Kotlin Software Engineer

Software Engineer – Reference Data Platform Location: London (Hybrid – 4 days per week in the office for 3 weeks of the month, 5 days for the final week.) We're working with a leading quantitative trading and technology firm that is looking for a Software Engineer to join its Reference Data team. This team builds and maintains the systems responsible for acquiring, processing and distributing market reference data used across the firm's research and trading platforms. The role offers the opportunity to work on modernising critical production systems, with a particular focus on a large-scale Java/JDK upgrade programme alongside wider improvements to platform reliability, observability and cloud-native infrastructure. The Role You'll be developing and maintaining distributed services responsible for ingesting and processing financial market data. The platform consists of containerised applications and scheduled workloads running on Kubernetes, providing high-quality reference data to quantitative researchers and trading systems. A significant part of the role will involve upgrading legacy Java services to modern JDK versions, improving maintainability, performance and security across the platform. You'll also contribute to engineering initiatives around observability, deployment automation and developer tooling. The engineering team embraces modern software development practices and makes extensive use of AI-assisted development tools to improve productivity and accelerate delivery. Responsibilities Develop and maintain services responsible for ingesting and processing market reference data.Deliver Java/JDK upgrade projects across existing production applications.Improve the reliability, scalability and performance of distributed systems.Enhance platform observability using modern telemetry and monitoring tooling.Work with Kubernetes-based services and deployment pipelines.Collaborate with software engineers, platform teams and quantitative researchers to deliver robust data infrastructure.Contribute to CI/CD and cloud-native engineering practices.Utilise AI-powered development tools to support software engineering workflows. Tech Stack Java (including JDK migration work)KotlinPythonKubernetesArgoCDOpenTelemetryModern CI/CD pipelines Requirements Commercial software engineering experience using Java.Experience upgrading or modernising Java applications (JDK migrations highly desirable).Experience building distributed systems or backend services.Familiarity with Kubernetes and containerised applications.Exposure to observability tooling such as OpenTelemetry or similar.Experience working with Kotlin and/or Python would be beneficial.Interest in building reliable, scalable infrastructure supporting high-performance systems.