Data Engineer (6 Month Contract)

Contract Data Engineer (JVM / Kotlin / Python) 6-month initial contract | Onsite (potential for hybrid) An elite quantitative research and trading firm is looking for a Contract Data Engineer to join a Reference Data Engineering team supporting critical research and trading use cases. This team owns complex financial market datasets that describe how markets are structured and behave, and plays a key role in ensuring high-quality, reliable data flows across the organisation. What you’ll be doing • Owning and enhancing data pipelines that process large-scale financial market data • Modernising existing data flows, upgrading legacy JVM-based pipelines into newer, cleaner architectures • Remapping incoming datasets and rewriting ingestion and transformation pipelines • Working across SQL Server, JVM applications, and Spark-based workloads • Contributing improvements to data quality, performance, and maintainability Tech environment • Kotlin & Spring Boot for core data processing services • Python for tooling and automation • Legacy systems in C# and Scala / Spark • Exposure to data lakes and large-scale data platforms is a strong plus What they’re looking for • Strong JVM background (Kotlin, Java, or Scala) • Experience building or modernising data pipelines • Solid understanding of SQL and data processing systems • Comfortable working in complex, performance-sensitive environments • Financial markets or trading data experience is beneficial but not essential 6-month initial contract with potential to extend. Onsite by default, with some flexibility for hybrid working. Happy to share more detail with interested candidates — drop me a message.