Lead Python Engineer (Risk), London

Our client, a global commodity trading company committed to innovation, is seeking a Senior Risk Engineer to join their engineering team. This role operates at the intersection of commodities risk, market data, and modern software delivery.

You will work in a fast-paced environment, taking full ownership of problems from high-level business requirements through to production deployment, often within the same day.

This is a hands‑on engineering position involving coding, architectural design, and close collaboration with risk and trading stakeholders to translate complex domain requirements into robust, scalable solutions.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain risk engineering systems across the full stack, with a focus on commodities risk and market data pipelines;
• Take high‑level, loosely defined requirements from trading and risk stakeholders and independently infer the detail needed to deliver correct, production‑ready solutions;
• Contribute to multiple daily releases in a CI/CD environment — writing code that is testable, observable, and safe to ship continuously;
• Work within and help evolve cloud‑native, engineering‑led platforms, applying modern infrastructure and deployment practices;
• Collaborate closely with quants, traders, and risk managers to ensure systems accurately reflect market and risk realities;
• Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and architectural decisions with a pragmatic, delivery‑focused mindset;
• Identify and address technical debt without being asked.

Skills

Must have

• Solid understanding of commodities markets — price risk, mark‑to‑market, curves, and market data flows;
• Experience building or maintaining systems that consume and process market data at scale;
• Proficient Python practitioner — you write clean, idiomatic, well‑tested code as a matter of habit;
• Working knowledge of full‑stack development: comfortable across backend services, APIs, and front‑end interfaces as needed;
• Experienced with cloud‑based platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and the engineering practices that go with them — containerization, infrastructure‑as‑code, managed services;
• Fluent in agentic development workflows — you use AI‑assisted tooling (e.g. Copilot, Cursor, or equivalent) as a natural part of your SDLC, not as a novelty; comfortable with AI‑generated code review, test generation, and iterative refinement within a fast‑release pipeline;
• Comfortable operating in a high‑velocity delivery environment with multiple releases per day;
• Disciplined about testing, observability, and rollback — you ship fast without being reckless;
• Able to take ambiguous, high‑level requirements and drive them to completion without hand‑holding.

Nice to have

• C++ / Rust
• Experience with Trading Technologies FIX gateway