Senior Data Engineer
1 day ago
Southampton
Senior Data Engineer (Quant & Alternative Data) Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE (relocation support provided) Compensation: £120,000–£300,000 total compensation (fully guaranteed, all-in) The Role We are building a centralised data engineering and research platform that supports quantitative research teams across multiple asset classes. This is not an asset-class-specific role, and not a traditional downstream analytics, BI, or ML-only position. The team focuses on large-scale alternative and unstructured data, working from first principles to define the data foundations, tooling, and experimentation standards used across the investment platform. The work involves messy, evolving datasets, performance-sensitive pipelines, and open-ended technical problems. Much of the stack is built in-house and remains largely greenfield. What You’ll Do • Design and build data ingestion, validation, and transformation systems from scratch, • Own datasets end-to-end, from raw ingestion through validation and transformation to research-ready delivery and downstream consumers, • Work with financial and alternative datasets used in quantitative research, including structured and unstructured data, large-scale text sources, and other high-dimensional, noisy data where failure modes are not always known upfront, • Build frameworks and tooling to support experimentation, • Optimise systems for correctness, robustness, and performance, • Investigate anomalies, inconsistencies, and data quality issues, • Work directly with quants, researchers, and data scientists in an iterative, research-driven environment This Role Is a Good Fit If You • Are strong in Python and SQL, and comfortable working close to raw data, • Have experience building and operating modern data pipelines with real ownership, • Have worked on research-, trading-, or decision-critical systems, • Are curious about modern data tooling (e.g. Polars, Julia, Rust, Lakehouse patterns), even if you haven’t used all of it yet, • Prefer hands-on technical ownership Ideal Background • Systematic funds, quantitative asset managers, HFTs, or trading firms, • FinTechs or financial data providers, • Big Tech or adjacent industries where work maps structurally to quant data problems (e.g. large-scale recommender systems, NLP on unstructured data, anomaly detection, knowledge graphs), • Smaller teams with broad ownership and responsibility Compensation & Benefits • Fully guaranteed, competitive compensation, • Education allowance for dependent children, • 30 working days of annual leave, plus public holidays, • Comprehensive healthcare for employee and family, • Business class relocation flights, • Joining and departure allowances The role is on-site in Abu Dhabi. Short-term remote work during peak summer months is supported. The working model prioritises sustainability and focused technical work. Send your CV and a brief summary to