Market Access Developer - C++

This role is with our longest standing client, who are seeking a C++ Market Access Developer to build and enhance low-latency connectivity and execution capabilities for electronic trading. You will design, implement and support high-performance market access components, ensuring reliability, resiliency and deterministic performance across critical trading hours.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain ultra-low-latency C++ systems for market data and order routing across multiple venues and asset classes.
• Implement exchange connectivity and trading protocols (e.g., FIX, OUCH, ITCH, binary/native APIs) and manage session state, sequencing and recovery.
• Optimise performance (latency and throughput) through profiling, lock avoidance, efficient memory management, cache-friendly data structures and careful concurrency design.
• Build robust monitoring, alerting and operational tooling; produce runbooks and support incident resolution during trading hours.
• Work closely with quant/trading, infrastructure and risk teams to deliver features such as throttling, pre-trade risk checks and kill-switch controls.
• Ensure high code quality via testing, code reviews, CI pipelines and clear documentation.
• Participate in on-call/rotation support as required.

Required Skills and Experience

• Strong professional experience in modern C++ (C++14/17/20), including multithreading, atomics, RAII and template-based design.
• Proven experience developing low-latency or high-throughput systems, ideally in electronic trading/market access.
• Solid understanding of TCP/IP, UDP multicast, socket programming, packet capture and network performance tuning.
• Experience with Linux (bash, system tools) and debugging/profiling (e.g., gdb, perf, valgrind, flame graphs).
• Good knowledge of data structures, algorithms and time-sensitive system design.
• Experience with build and CI tooling (e.g., CMake, Git, Jenkins/GitLab CI) and automated testing practices.
• Ability to diagnose production issues quickly and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Desirable

• Knowledge of exchange microstructure, order types and trading session behaviour.
• Experience with kernel bypass/low-latency networking (e.g., DPDK, Solarflare/OpenOnload) and hardware timestamping.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (metrics, logs and tracing) and high-availability architectures.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.