Software Engineer - ETL

About Akuna: 

Akuna Capital is an innovative trading firm with a strong focus on collaboration, cutting-edge technology, data driven solutions, and automation. We specialize in providing liquidity as an options market-maker – meaning we are committed to providing competitive quotes that we are willing to both buy and sell. To do this successfully, we design and implement our own low latency technologies, trading strategies, and mathematical models. 

Our Founding Partners first conceptualized Akuna in their hometown of Sydney. They opened the firm’s first office in 2011 in the heart of the derivatives industry and the options capital of the world – Chicago. Today, Akuna is proud to operate from additional offices in Sydney, Shanghai and London.

What you’ll do as a Software Engineer on the Data Engineering team at Akuna:

We are a data-driven organization, and we believe that our data provides a key competitive advantage; data is essential to the success of our business. The Akuna Data Engineering team is composed of world class talent responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the systems, applications and infrastructure needed to collect, store, process, manage and query Akuna’s data assets. The Akuna Data Engineering team plays a crucial role in ensuring that trustworthy data is available, reliable, and accessible to support various data-driven initiatives within Akuna’s Quant, Trading, and Compliance business units. In this role, you will: 

• Work within a growing Data Engineering division supporting the strategic role of data at Akuna
• Drive the ongoing design and expansion of our data platform across a wide variety of data sources, supporting an array of streaming, operational and research workflows
• Work closely with Trading, Quant and Compliance teams throughout the firm to identify how data is produced and consumed, helping to define and deliver high impact projects
• Build and deploy ETL pipelines to collect and transform our rapidly growing Big Data set within our hybrid cloud architecture utilizing Kubernetes/EKS, Kafka/MSK, Apache Flink and Databricks/Spark.
• Mentor junior developers in software and data engineering best practices
• Produce clean, well-tested, and documented code with a clear design to support mission critical applications
• Build automated data validation test suites that ensure that data is processed and published in accordance with well-defined Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) pertaining to data quality, data availability and data correctness
• Challenge the status quo and help push our organization forward, as we grow beyond the limits of our current tech stack

Qualities that make great candidates: 

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Math, or equivalent technical field
• 3+ years of professional experience developing software applications
• Scala experience required – Python experience an added plus
• Highly motivated and willing to take ownership of high-impact projects upon arrival
• Prior hands-on experience with data platforms and technologies such as Delta Lake, Spark, Kafka, ClickHouse, and/or AWS Aurora PostgreSQL / RDS
• Experience building large-scale batch and streaming ETL pipelines
• Must possess excellent communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills
• Demonstrated experience working with diverse data sets and frameworks across multiple domains – financial data experience not required, but a strong plus
• Experience with containerization and container orchestration technologies, like Docker, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD
• Recent hands-on experience with AWS or other public cloud providers (GCP, Azure) is strongly preferred
• Demonstrated experience working on an Agile team using software engineering best practices like Continuous Integration / Deployment to deliver complex software projects

Please note that level/title will be determined upon the conclusion of the interview process. If you are a current student or recent graduate, please take a look at our Entry Level and Intern positions.