Durlston Partners

Systems Engineer – Fintech – Remote – £90,000–£130,000 + Equity

F1 drivers used to talk about “mechanical sympathy” – the idea that the best drivers didn’t just push the machine, they understood it. Martin Thompson, co-founder and CTO of LMAX, applied that same principle to software. Out of it came the Disruptor, a concurrent programming framework that achieved extraordinary performance not through magic, but through understanding how hardware actually behaves: CPU caches, memory layout, the way a processor wants to move through data. Code written with the machine, not against it.

The Head of Engineering you’d be reporting into spent 20 years working at the systems level on the buy-side in London, in some of the most demanding environments going. He knows what mechanical sympathy looks like under real pressure. He’s now applying those same standards to a fintech company tackling a genuinely large, unsolved problem in cross-border payments and building a team around that philosophy.

The team big enough for a significant funding round, small enough to get to know everyone personally. Low-ego, highly capable, and several have made a deliberate move from hedge fund and HFT backgrounds to work on something with real social impact. The stack is Go, top to bottom.

The role

A hybrid of systems and backend engineering — you’ll write production Go, own your systems end-to-end, and work in an environment where observability isn’t an afterthought. Infrastructure, code, and business metrics flow through a unified pipeline.

• Top-of-market base with meaningful equity upside at an early stage
• Fully remote within two hours of London
• First-principles thinking actively taught and encouraged, not just expected
• Full health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
• Large contribution to home office setup
• Unlimited paid time off, parental leave, and periodic team meetups across Europe

What you’ll be doing

• Building and owning the infrastructure that runs the production payments platform
• Writing production Go — this is an engineering role, not a scripting role
• Performance tuning and reliability engineering — treating failure as an inevitability, not an edge case
• Instrumenting the stack with logs, traces, and metrics through a unified observability pipeline
• Security analysis across network, OS, and code layers
• Participating in on-call rotas to support the platform operationally

What you’ll bring

• 5+ years in systems engineering, SRE, or a closely related discipline
• Production-level Go, written to a standard a senior backend engineer would respect
• Strong mechanical sympathy — able to reason from first principles about what happens close to the metal
• Solid Kubernetes and OS internals: user/kernel separation, system calls, and beyond
• Host-level networking — TCP/IP, iptables, CNI
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform or equivalent
• Observability instincts — knowing when to reach for logs, traces, or metrics and how to unify them
• Relational database experience is a strong plus

We recognise that individuals are not just checkboxes. If you’re intrigued by this opportunity but unsure if it’s the right fit, feel free to reach out — [email protected]

If this role isn’t right for you but you know someone who’d be a great fit, we have a market-leading referral scheme in place to thank anyone who refers a candidate who successfully passes probation.

Infrastructure Lead (Hands On) – Global Securities Firm (Market Making) – London – Greenfield AWS Trading Infra

Are you ready to lead the infrastructure vision of a global trading firm?

We’re looking for an accomplished Infrastructure Lead/Head of Infrastructure to drive the transformation of a cutting-edge trading environment – scaling systems that power real-time decision-making across global markets.

This is an opportunity to own an ambitious cloud migration and greenfield build-out, working with world-class technologists and traders on platforms that demand ultra-low latency, resilience, and scalability.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the design and delivery of next-generation trading infrastructure across cloud and on-prem environments.
• Drive the firm’s migration to AWS, architecting hybrid solutions that balance performance, security, and cost.
• Build and mentor a top-tier DevOps and Infra team.
• Implement automation and monitoring solutions that keep mission-critical systems running at peak performance.
• Collaborate closely with engineering, trading, and risk teams to deliver reliable, high-speed platforms.

What’s In It for You

• Strategic ownership – Take full responsibility for shaping infrastructure decisions across a high-growth trading business.
• Greenfield opportunity – Lead the buildout of a new, global environment from the ground up.
• Innovation-first culture – Work with elite engineers in a technically demanding, forward-thinking environment.
• Impact & visibility – Partner directly with senior leadership, influencing both technology and trading outcomes.
• Competitive compensation – Reflective of the seniority and technical depth of the role.

What You Bring

• 7+ years in infrastructure, DevOps, or cloud engineering within trading, financial services, or other high-performance environments.
• Proven leadership experience with AWS and hybrid architectures.
• Strong technical grounding in networking, automation, and system reliability.
• Hands-on skills in scripting (Python, Bash), infrastructure as code, and network optimisation for latency-sensitive systems.