Senior Data Engineer - Java (New York City, NY)

Senior Software Engineer – Data Engineering

Role Overview

Our client, a leading global financial technology firm, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join its Data Engineering team.

This team designs, builds, and supports large-scale, fault-tolerant data platforms that power mission-critical electronic trading systems. The platform processes billions of events every day, capturing real-time trading activity for regulatory reporting, analytics, business intelligence, and market data products. Engineers on this team build highly available, high-performance systems that serve as a core competitive advantage for the business.

This is a hands-on engineering role in a fast-paced environment where you'll develop scalable software focused on big data, distributed systems, and real-time analytics while partnering closely with business and technology stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain highly available, fault-tolerant software processing billions of data events each day.
• Drive architectural decisions that improve scalability, resiliency, maintainability, and performance.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to gather requirements and deliver innovative technical solutions.
• Identify opportunities to improve system performance, user experience, and operational efficiency.
• Build and maintain APIs and tools for querying, summarizing, and analyzing large datasets.
• Develop automated monitoring, alerting, and health-check capabilities for production systems.
• Generate reporting solutions that provide actionable business insights.
• Maintain technical documentation and promote engineering best practices.
• Utilize AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor, etc.) to improve engineering productivity and software quality.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong Java development experience (3+ years)
• Experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database
• Linux/Unix development experience, including shell scripting
• Experience with Git or other version control systems
• Passion for building high-performance, data-intensive applications
• Strong understanding of software design patterns, data structures, and algorithms
• Experience using AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Ability to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building distributed systems or big data platforms
• Financial services, capital markets, or electronic trading experience
• Experience with market data, real-time analytics, or event-driven architectures
• Knowledge of high-availability, low-latency system design