Front-End Developer

The Firm

XTX Markets is an algorithmic trading firm that actively trades tens of thousands of instruments on over eighty venues with a daily volume of almost three hundred billion USD. We partner with counterparties, exchanges, and e-trading venues globally to provide consistent liquidity in the Equity, FX, Fixed Income, Commodity & Options markets, helping market participants throughout the world obtain the best prices in the various assets classes we cover.

We leverage the talent of the people who work here, modern computational techniques and state-of-the-art research infrastructure to analyse large data sets across markets quickly and efficiently, to maximise the effectiveness of our proprietary trading algorithms. The models that drive our trading strategies have evolved considerably over the last 10 years, from econometric methods that gave our company its name, to trees, to neural networks, to modern deep learning architectures. We are actively seeking new methods and ideas.

At XTX Markets technology is our business and we are a diverse organisation which attracts outstanding talent from across all industry backgrounds. We are focused on teamwork and our people collaborate on all aspects of the business, working openly and with respect for each other, our clients and the market. Our culture is non-hierarchical and one where everyone is valued. We strive for excellence in everything we do.

The Role

You will be part of a small team responsible for the front ends of XTX’s command-and-control system for our global trading activity. You will be responsible for the mission control panel for one of the largest trading systems in the world ($250bn-300bn/day).

The goal is to provide clarity about what our trading system (hundreds of thousands of strategies) is doing at any given moment and how it is performing. We supply both high-level and incredibly detailed views, as both are crucial for efficient decision making and spotting issues.

Our team is framework-agnostic, and a lot of our simpler GUIs are written in vanilla Typescript, though familiarity with one or more common web frameworks is always a plus.

Your work will have companywide impact and you’ll work alongside your team lead, as well as other engineers and Quants, developing and improving internal tools and frameworks. You’ll have the opportunity to work with GUI users to develop new ways of exploring and presenting data, and your work will be used daily by multiple teams for trading-critical activities.

Responsibilities

• Working on improvements to our internal tools: charts and grids of real-time data.
• Improving our framework that underpins those tools, and helping other engineers build against it.
• Contributing to documentation and automated testing so we can make changes with confidence.
• Helping end-users document bugs, and determining whether it lies within the framework, a team’s backend service, or an upstream data source.
• Collaborating with Team Lead to add, prune and prioritise framework features.
• Advocating for GUI best-practice (security, design) across different teams

Essential Attributes

• A pragmatic and approachable developer capable of working autonomously
• High confidence using plain Javascript to handle and display real-time events
• Be familiar with common layout/design patterns for flows like data entry, analysis and export
• Understand some basic UX research techniques; you have watched users use your GUIs and improved them as a result

Desirable Attributes

• Have worked in a multi-disciplinary team on a project, including liaising with back-end or full stack developers on the design of an API for a client to consume
• Have experience developing internal tools, and taking feedback from users of those tools
• Have a brief portfolio of work, perhaps with redacted screenshots or mockups
• Be familiar with the 2D Canvas API, or similar.
• Have used websockets in the client, and potentially a websocket library in the server
• Have used Cypress, Puppeteer or Selenium for automated E2E testing
• Have used a client/server federated auth library e.g. OAuth/OpenID, perhaps Kerberos
• Be capable of creating simple backend applications in Node or Python, for testing or to proxy events

Benefits

• Flexible working options
• Onsite gym, sauna, and fitness classes at no charge
• Extensive medical benefits including an on-site doctor and therapist at no charge
• Breakfast and lunch provided Tues, Weds and Thurs
• Various supports for caregivers, including emergency dependent care
• Beautiful Kings Cross office: https://vimeo.com/257888726
• 25 days paid holiday per year + statutory holiday and paid sick days
• Typically employees work from our office 4 days per week.