Senior KDB+ Developer at Synechron, London Area, £Contract Rate

About Synechron:

Synechron is a leading digital transformation consulting firm dedicated to delivering innovative technology solutions within banking, financial services, and insurance. We thrive on engineering excellence, collaboration, and a passion for cutting-edge technologies.

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Senior KDB+ Developer to design, develop, and optimize high performance data platforms built on kdb+. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in kdb+ tick architecture, performance tuning at scale, and close collaboration with business stakeholders—particularly within Risk functions—to deliver robust, efficient, and maintainable solutions.

This role also includes technical responsibilities, mentoring junior developers and promoting best practices across the team.

Job Location: London (Hybrid - 3 days in the office)

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain kdb+ tick systems, with a strong understanding of data organisation, schema design, and the performance implications of different architectural approaches.
• Build and operate solutions handling large scale, high frequency datasets, ensuring low latency, high throughput, and efficient memory usage.
• Analyse and optimise q queries, data models, and ingestion pipelines for both real time and historical workloads.
• Collaborate closely with Risk function teams to translate business requirements into efficient, scalable, and performant kdb+ solutions.
• Take ownership of performance diagnostics, including CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network considerations across kdb+ processes.
• Develop robust and reusable q libraries, utilities, and frameworks with a strong focus on clean, maintainable, and performant code.
• Drive continuous improvement through refactoring, performance benchmarking, and adoption of best practices.
• Mentor and guide junior and mid-level developers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, code quality, and knowledge sharing.
• Participate in design reviews, production support, and root cause analysis of complex system issues.
• Work collaboratively within an Agile or iterative delivery environment, contributing to design, implementation, testing, and release phases

Required Skills & Experience

• 8+ years of hands on experience in kdb+ development in a production environment.
• Strong expertise in q language, including:
• Table design (splayed, partitioned, segmented)
• In memory vs on disk trade offs
• Efficient joins, aggregations, and windowed analytics
• Deep understanding of kdb+ tick architecture, including ticker plant, RDB, HDB, and associated patterns.
• Proven experience working with large datasets and optimising queries for performance and scalability.
• Strong background in Unix/Linux environments, including shell scripting for automation, monitoring, and operational tooling.
• Solid understanding of software delivery processes and methodologies (Agile, CI/CD, version control, release management).
• Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, demonstrating systematic reasoning and problem solving skills.

Desirable / Nice to Have Skills

• Knowledge of inter process communication mechanisms in kdb+ and integration with external systems.

• Experience tuning kdb+ systems for low latency and high availability.

• Familiarity with data quality checks, validation frameworks, and operational resilience patterns.

• Exposure to financial markets data (e.g. market data, trading, risk, or post trade workflows, equity asset class).

Personal Attributes

• Passion for writing clean, efficient, and well-structured code.

• Proactive mindset with a strong focus on continuous improvement.

• Comfortable taking ownership and working independently on complex technical problems.

• Collaborative team player who enjoys mentoring others and raising overall technical standards.

Diversity Statement

Synechron are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative ‘Same Difference’ is committed to fostering an inclusive culture – promoting equality, diversity and an environment that is respectful to all. We encourage applicants from across diverse backgrounds, race, ethnicities, religion, age, marital status, gender, sexual orientations, or disabilities to apply. We offer flexible workplace arrangements, mentoring, internal mobility, learning and development programmes to support our global workforce. Empowerment and collaboration are at the core of how we operate.

All employment decisions at Synechron are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to the applicant’s gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.