Head of Trading Systems and Software Engineering

About Caxton Associates

Caxton Associates, founded in 1983, is a global trading and investment firm with offices in London, New York, Singapore, Monaco, Dubai and Bengaluru. Caxton Associates’ primary business is to manage client and proprietary capital through a suite of products designed to fit the specific needs of investors. Employing a multi-portfolio manager framework, Caxton excels in discretionary global macro investing, leveraging its diversified expertise across asset classes and markets.

About the role

We are seeking an experienced engineering leader to head our Trading Technology and Software Engineering Team. Based in London and reporting to the CTO, you will lead engineers across London and Bangalore, with accountability for delivery, engineering quality and team development.

The team develops and supports our in-house order management system and manages FIX connectivity to all trading venues and platforms. It also builds and maintains wider applications and services supporting trading, compliance and operations.

This is a rare opportunity to take end-to-end ownership of our trading technology, working directly with business stakeholders and the execution desk. You’ll set the technical direction and engineering standards for the team, and see the impact of your decisions directly in how the business trades.

Requirements

• Lead and develop the Tradeflow and Software Engineering Team across London and Bangalore, including recruitment, performance management, mentoring and career development.
• Own the technical direction and delivery of OMX, Caxton's in-house order management system, including real-time order entry services and applications for front-office users.
• Oversee the development and support of FIX connectivity to trading platforms and venues, including Tradeweb, TradingScreen, BidFX and Bloomberg AIM. Work with the execution desk and middle-office teams on integration and troubleshooting.
• Lead the design and delivery of scalable, maintainable C#/.NET services and applications supporting trading, compliance and operations. Contribute directly to architecture, code reviews and implementation.
• Manage priorities with business stakeholders, allocate engineers across projects, and communicate delivery plans and risks
• Establish best practices for software design, automated testing, CI/CD, release management and technical documentation.
• Own application support and incident escalation for the team's systems. Plan support coverage alongside development commitments and ensure production problems lead to permanent improvements.
• Act as the team's senior technical and delivery contact, working with business users and Technology teams across London, Bangalore, and New York.

Required Experience

• At least twelve years of active software development experience using C# and the .NET stack, with a track record of delivering reliable production systems.
• Proven experience managing and developing software engineers, with responsibility for delivery, engineering quality and competing business priorities.
• Detailed knowledge of the order-to-trade lifecycle, order types, execution workflows, and pre-trade and post-trade validation.
• Experience developing and supporting FIX connectivity, together with an understanding of production reliability in trading systems.
• Knowledge of real-time market data feeds and Bloomberg APIs such as SAPI, B-PIPE and Desktop API.
• Strong hands-on technical judgement and the ability to guide architecture while maintaining credibility through design reviews, code reviews and practical problem solving.
• Deep knowledge of C# including concurrency, performance and design.
• Experience designing distributed systems using event-driven, layered or client-server architectures, and building reusable components, services and libraries.
• Experience building real-time services and user interfaces using technologies such as WPF, WinForms or Blazor, and messaging technologies such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, or equivalent.
• Strong SQL and relational database skills, including schema design, query optimisation and stored procedures, using Microsoft SQL Server or an equivalent platform.
• Practical experience with test-driven development, unit and integration testing, refactoring, CI/CD pipelines and modern development workflows.
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders, and experience working with engineers and business users across regions.

Desired experience

• Experience with Docker and AWS services such as EC2 and RDS.
• Experience with Python and its ecosystem.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Mathematics or a related field.