Job Description & Details
If you know your way around high-throughput market data systems and have spent time building pre-trade analytics platforms, this 12-month gig in Houston is worth a serious look. You are stepping into a core IT team that builds the infrastructure powering real-time trading decisions, meaning your code directly impacts live financial workflows.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day-to-day will revolve around designing, building, and operating cloud-native APIs, microservices, and event-driven architectures that ingest and process massive streams of market data. You won't just write Python code and throw it over the fence; you will own the entire lifecycle from cloud architecture and CI/CD pipelines to production support and technical leadership. Expect to collaborate daily with quantitative researchers, traders, and cybersecurity teams while carving out time to mentor junior engineers on best practices.
The Core Tech Stack
Python is your daily driver here, paired heavily with AWS serverless and container orchestration platforms like Docker, ECS, or EKS. You also need solid experience with Infrastructure as Code—think Terraform, AWS CDK, or CloudFormation—alongside standard observability tools. Most importantly, none of this matters unless you have genuine pre-trading domain knowledge; the hiring team will immediately weed out candidates who don't understand pre-trade decision support, pricing pipelines, and market data dynamics.
Interview Expectations
When you sit down with the engineering lead, expect them to grill you on how you handle backpressure and failure recovery in event-driven streaming architectures using Python and AWS. They are secretly looking to see if you panic when market data spikes unexpectedly or if you instinctively design resilient, decoupled systems with robust observability. You will also likely be asked to walk through a complex IaC deployment failure and explain how you ensure zero-downtime microservice updates in a high-stakes financial environment.
Application Advice
To get past the ATS and grab the recruiter's attention, make sure your resume explicitly highlights production-grade Python microservices and complex AWS event-driven architectures. Do not just list tools; quantify the scale of the market data you have handled and explicitly spell out your pre-trading domain expertise right at the top so they know you speak the language of trading desks from day one.