Principal Software Engineer

Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets.

Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 600 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Finland and beyond.

Job Description

The Role

Our next generation of real-time market data platform operates around the globe, 24 x 7, connecting to over 6 financial exchanges, delivering real-time market data, benchmark prices, news content and research data to our customers around the world. This is an exciting and unique opportunity to join our team to help shape and build our financial data platform that will help power the business through the next phase of its digital growth. 

The new platform is being engineered for the cloud as a set of scalable, fault-tolerant microservices with rich web and mobile UIs. Our technology stack is largely Microsoft, although we also leverage a number of open-source software adopting the right tool for the job approach. 

In this hands-on development role, you will be a senior member of the development team reporting to an Engineering Manager. As a principal engineer you will also be expected to contribute to the overall strategic and technical direction of the Technology Team. You will be a highly productive developer who is passionate about writing clean, quality code, building high-scale distributed systems that are fault-tolerant, with deep operational insights. You will take an engineering approach to developing new services and systems, favouring metrics over personal opinion or bias. You will have good communication skills and be able to mentor and help grow more junior developers, coaching them on good design, coding and software engineering practices. This is an individual contributor role, where you will be providing technical leadership. 

Principal Accountabilities

• Responsible for guiding coding best practice 

• Deliver high quality, performant code to SOLID design principals 

• Provide mentorship and guidance for more junior engineers

• Contribute to overall strategic technical direction 

KEY INTERFACES

• Engineering Manager

• Software engineering team

• SRE

• Enterprise Architect

• Product Owners / Product Management

Qualifications

We recruit talented, dynamic people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, all united by a belief in our mission to provide the world’s leading and most trusted price reporting, events, and intelligence service for the markets we serve. We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to creating a fully inclusive workplace, where everyone feels able to participate and contribute meaningfully.

If you are open-minded, curious, resilient, solutions-oriented and committed to promoting equality, then read on...

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

We are looking for an individual who is highly motivated, driven, and have a passion to be part of a fast-paced, successful team. Being a strong team player is also important as well as someone who is happy to work flexibly.

A successful candidate will have:

• C# /.NET Framework 

• Solid understanding of concurrent programming 

• Messaging technologies, e.g. Service Bus, Event Hubs etc 

• Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration 

• Distributed systems, REST, SOA 

• ASP.NET / Web development 

• SQL and NoSQL database experience 

• Good communication skills, collaborative attitude and strong team player with a strong desire to ship software to customers

• Experience of developing real-time, low-latency systems 

• Ability to mentor and grow more junior developers 

• A successful candidate might also have: 

A successful candidate will likely have some of the following:

• .NET 8.0 or higher 

• Cloud computing – Ideally Azure. 

• FIX or SBE message processing or similar

• Garbage free .NET development 

• Distributed caching technologies, e.g. Redis 

• Stress and performance testing / tuning 

• Code benchmarking 

• C++ experience (even if not current) 

• Experience developing microservices 

• An understanding of network reference models and networking protocols (UDP, TCP) 

• Continuous Delivery 

• Knowledge of market data, commodity exchanges and financial instruments 

• Personal Attributes 

• Deeply technical 

• Continuously looking for ways to improve (yourself, your team, the code the processes) 

• Strategic thinker with the ability to execute and deliver in a fast-paced environment 

• Highly collaborative and able to work across multiple teams and geographies 

• Results-driven, with a focus on long-term value creation 

If you're excited about the role but your experience, skills or

qualifications

Additional Information

Our Values

Fastmarkets people come from all different walks of life. It’s this mix of brilliant personalities, experiences and insights that gives us that warm, open, and friendly culture you can feel as soon as you meet us. But however wonderfully different we all are, there are six things we all have in common – and they form our Fastmarkets values.

Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits that Fastmarkets people have, our values are key to what makes our culture unique. They reflect who each of us are and they're embedded in everything we do. Our values are:

• METRICS DRIVEN. We use insights to improve our customers’ experience and our business performance
  
• ACCOUNTABLE. We are accountable to ourselves and those we work with: we keep our promises and get things done
  
• GROWTH MINDSET . This value enables us to be nimble to the changing realities and operate with a sense of urgency
  
• INCLUSIVE. We are inclusive and respectful, celebrating each of us and giving everyone a deep sense of belonging with the desire to bring their best self to work every day.
  
• CUSTOMER CENTRIC. We are customer-centric in all that we do
  
• COLLABORATIVE. We are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences.

You’ve read a little about us – now it’s over to you!

If you like what you’ve read so far and think you can see yourself as a Fastmarkets person, it’s time to fill in your application form. This form is an important part of the selection process: it’s used to determine whether or not you’ll be chosen to have an interview and acts as a basis for the questions we’ll ask you on the day.

It’s vital that you try to capture all the relevant information we have asked for on the form so we can get a good feel for who you are and why you’re great.