JOB DESCRIPTION
Data Platform Engineer
Flow Traders is looking for a Senior Data Platform Engineer to join the Data Platform team in our Amsterdam office.
We are a leading proprietary trading firm with an entrepreneurial culture. We value sharp, creative engineers and give them the room and the responsibility to make full use of their abilities.
Your mission is to build and run the platform at the centre of the firm: the source of truth for our proprietary research data, the foundation every department builds on, and the context layer our AI agents depend on. You will make it the place where anyone, human or agent, can find trusted data, understand it, and build on it quickly and safely. Working closely with our Quants and research engineers, you will help shape how the firm does systematic trading.
What you will do
- Own performance at scale. Take ownership of the distributed systems, storage and processing platforms that power our data-intensive applications. You will push them to perform under real market load, from tuning a slow pipeline to designing monitoring and alerting that catches problems before our traders do.
- Build and maintain platform capabilities. Design and maintain the products our users rely on every day: self-provisioned compute, scheduling, transformations, ad-hoc exploration. Treat quants, analysts and other teams as customers of a platform product.
- Make the hard design calls. Be part of the group that shapes the data landscape at Flow Traders. Decide on data modelling, storage formats and processing patterns, weighing performance, cost and maintainability.
- Run what you build. Keep it reliable on busy days, continuously improve resource usage and cost; investigate and resolve data issues and pipeline failures; build operational tooling and runbooks.
- Enable governance and context for AI. Build and maintain the tools that make good governance possible across the firm, such as our data catalog, lineage, access control and configurable data quality rules, and promote their adoption.
- Co-develop with AI, responsibly. Use coding agents daily to design, write, test and review code, while owning the correctness of everything that ships.
- Raise the bar around you. Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions and pairing, including how to work effectively and critically with AI tools.
What you need to succeed
Required
- 8+ years building and operating multiple data platforms in production, across different domains. You have made mistakes along the way and can explain what you would do differently.
- You reason from fundamentals (storage layouts, query execution, networking, distributed systems behavior) when designing systems.
- You are comfortable making trade-offs between latency, cost, consistency and simplicity, and can defend them to engineers and business users alike.
- Strong data modelling and data warehousing experience, including analytical engines (e.g. BigQuery, ClickHouse).
- Extensive hands-on experience with distributed storage, messaging (e.g. Kafka, Pub/Sub), batch and stream processing (e.g. Apache Beam, Spark) and container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes).
- Strong programming skills in Python and/or Java, with high standards for testing and code quality.
- Solid cloud experience across storage, databases (e.g. AlloyDB) and data processing, preferably GCP and AWS.
- Practical experience with data governance: ownership, lineage, access control, metadata management and data quality frameworks.
- Understanding of how AI systems consume data (retrieval, semantic layers, tool and agent interfaces) and what it takes to make data reliable context for them.
- You enjoy working with demanding internal users, translating vague needs into clear platform capabilities.
- You communicate clearly across technical and non-technical teams, and you like helping others grow.
- Interest in financial markets is a plus; prior trading experience is not required.
What we offer
At Flow Traders, we create the conditions for hard‑working, high‑performing people to do their best work. From a thorough onboarding and ongoing access to Flow Academy, to latest technology and a collaborative, non‑hierarchical culture, we give you the tools, ownership, and support to move fast and drive outcomes. We keep a close‑knit, small‑company feel while offering competitive salary, annual discretionary profit share, and comprehensive benefits, so talent can grow here, and stay here. See our benefits below:
- Flow Academy and opportunities to attend domain-related conferences
- Daily catered lunch, great coffee, and a fully stocked kitchen and snack bar
- In-house Bar and Lounge with arcade, table tennis, billiards, and game consoles
- Company boat
- In-house gym and sessions with our nutritionist or personal trainer
- Bi-weekly massages
- Annual company trip and a variety of events throughout the year, such as the New Years Event
- Global rotations across our offices worldwide
- and more
How We Work with AI
We build with AI, and we build for AI. You will use coding agents every day to move faster, but you will own every line that ships. You can explain why a query plan behaves the way it does, notice when generated code is quietly wrong, and know when to put the tools aside and think from first principles.
Our interview process reflects this: in some stages you will be welcome to use AI tools, and we will be just as interested in how you check their output as in what they produce.
Flow Traders does not accept unsolicited resumes from any professional staffing or search firms. All resumes, and any other information identifying potential candidates, submitted to any employee at Flow Traders via-email, the Internet or directly without a valid and signed search agreement will be deemed free to contact by Flow Traders without any restrictions and no placement fee of any kind will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Flow Traders.
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