HFT Engineer (Rust / C++)

TechShack are working with the digital-assets arm of a major, well-established UK trading firm. They run several books worth several $100m across CeFi and DeFi, and are scaling the team that owns the execution layer behind it.

You'll own the hot path, market data ingestion and normalisation, exchange connectivity and order gateways, the strategy/execution interface, order routing and pre-trade risk.

The desk is mid-migration from a C++ execution layer to Rust - if you've made that move, or driven it, that will be a big bonus. It's a front-office seat, working with quants and shipping live order flow.

Comp: Up to £250k base + uncapped PnL split.

What you'll build

• Market data handlers and exchange connectivity across CEX and DEX venues.
• Execution layer migration: porting and rebuilding hot-path services in Rust.
• Order routing, execution engines and pre-trade risk running 24/7.
• Low-latency internals: lock-free concurrency, cache-aware memory layout, tight allocation, event-driven design.

Who we're looking for

• 3+ years in performance-critical systems / backend, with production market-data or exchange-connectivity work.
• Rust or C++. Strong C++ engineers welcome if you have a strong interest in Rust or projects on GitHub.
• You've owned a path where P99 tick-to-trade is measured in microseconds.
• Solid on OS internals, the network stack (TCP/UDP, jitter, packet handling) and concurrency.
• Maths / stats / physics background is a plus.
• Open to very strong systems engineers with some quant exposure who want to broaden into a high-ownership seat.
• Candidates from traditional finance are greatly valued - domain knowledge can be taught in the role.

Bonus points

• Hardware and kernel-level optimisation: kernel bypass (DPDK, Solarflare/Onload), CPU pinning/affinity, NUMA, NIC/IRQ tuning, busy-polling, FPGA.
• Exchange protocols: FIX, binary feeds, ITCH/OUCH, SBE, multiplexed WebSockets, custom TCP feeds.
• Crypto market microstructure and venue connectivity at scale.
• HFT/MFT pedigree

Location

Core hub is London. Can also be based from Hong Kong, Singapore or the US. Remote within EU or UK time zone is possible for senior candidates only.

If this sounds like you, or you're in a trading engineering seat and want to know how to get here - apply here or dm me @StrictlyRust