Principal Java Engineer – eTrading

About Phi Partners

Phi Partners has been a trusted capital markets consultancy for more than 20 years, providing quantitative and technology expertise across front office, pricing and risk.

We support more than 80 financial institutions across the buy-side and sell-side through niche capabilities spanning quant, engineering, vendor platforms and cloud infrastructure.

Our teams work on complex, real-world problems across models, analytics, applications, data and cloud infrastructure, within an international delivery organisation built around regional hubs and specialist centres of excellence.

For people who enjoy technically demanding work in capital markets, Phi offers the opportunity to work closely with expert colleagues and major financial institutions on high-value, business-critical initiatives.

About the Client

Our client is a leading North American bank with a strong global markets presence, operating across Bonds, FX, Swaps, and Commodities. They run an in-house derivatives and risk system that powers their trading and eTrading infrastructure. With the majority of the team based in Toronto and expanding into New York to support US Treasury trading, they are driving modernization through Kubernetes-based on-prem infrastructure and seeking experienced eTrading developers to enhance performance, scalability, and integration across multiple asset classes.

About the Programme

This programme forms part of a multi-year strategic initiative to enhance the bank’s Front Office eTrading and risk infrastructure across multiple asset classes. The goal is to transition existing systems to a more modular, scalable microservices-based architecture while improving performance and supporting new trading use cases.

The project spans Bonds, FX, Swaps, and Commodities, with each area supported by dedicated development teams. The FX Options business operates within its own in-house derivatives and risk platform, while other asset classes are progressively being migrated to a shared, containerized environment powered by Kubernetes.

As part of this initiative, the client is expanding its global footprint, adding a New York presence to complement the core Toronto hub. The programme places strong emphasis on cross-asset collaboration, modernization of existing components, and empowering eTrading teams to build more efficient, flexible systems aligned with evolving market demands.

About the Role and Responsibilities

In this role, you will collaborate closely with Traders, Quants, Risk, and Front Office IT to design, build, and maintain robust eTrading systems that manage the full trade lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities:

• Delivering high-quality software solutions for trading and risk management systems.
• Designing and developing backend components in Core Java, with exposure to modern frameworks.
• Working with messaging and middleware technologies to ensure efficient trade flow and data distribution.
• Participating in system design, estimation, and architecture reviews.
• Managing small development teams or projects independently, with strong coordination and communication across stakeholders.
• Supporting and improving existing systems, reducing latency, and improving reliability.
• Performing light UI development (React or Angular), where required.

Key Skills

Essential skills:

• Strong experience in enterprise-level Java development (JDK 11+ or newer LTS), with deep understanding of Java internals including JVM, memory management, garbage collection, and performance tuning
• Hands-on experience with Java frameworks and libraries such as Spring/Spring Boot, Hibernate/JPA, multithreading
• Experience with messaging and data technologies in an enterprise environment, such as JMS, Kafka, and Solace, as well as caching technologies like Redis and Apache Ignite
• Practical expertise with relational databases, such as PostgreSQL, and SQL Server—covering schema design, indexing, and query optimization for analytics workload
• Systems & data engineering: hands-on with multi-threaded pipelines, large-scale data ingestion and realtime analytics
• Good awareness of enterprise engineering practices, such as fault tolerance, scalability, logging, monitoring & telemetry, CI/CD, containerisation, and modern tools like Git, Maven, Jenkins; cloud exposure (AWS/Azure) is a plus
• Experience of working in a financial services or capital markets environment delivering enterprise solutions as part of a global team
• Problem-solving mindset: history of proposing and implementing “seen-it-before” solutions under real world constraints
• Proven technical leadership with strong client-facing communication, a passion for innovation, and a commitment to high code and design standards.

Nice to have:

• • Familiarity with React or Angular (for occasional UI development).
  • Understanding of Derivatives, Bonds, FX, and Swaps workflows.
  • Experience with Market Data systems and Front Office integrations.
  • Exposure to Cloud environments (not essential but beneficial).
  • Prior experience in eTrading or Market Making platforms.

Next steps

This role offers a dynamic opportunity to work on innovative solutions that enhance the efficiency and performance of front office technology. This is an excellent opportunity allowing you to be a fundamental of the team as it grows, as part of this programme, while also establishing yourself within a rapidly expanding consultancy firm. The role provides an opportunity to collaborate with high-profile financial experts and world class engineers from across the world.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply below. We look forward to speaking with you and discussing your application in more detail at your earliest convenience.

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