Senior DevOps Engineer – Global Derivatives Trading (FIX & Market Data)(Contract)

Job Title: Senior DevOps Engineer – Global Derivatives Trading (FIX & Market Data)

Location: On-Site Houston, Texas

Employment Type: Contract

About the Role

You’ll work closely with product, delivery, and infrastructure teams to proactively manage critical end‑to‑end trading workflows, reduce technical debt, and drive measurable improvements in stability, resilience, and speed.

You’ll be a subject matter expert across exchange‑traded derivatives, FIX connectivity, market data distribution, and time‑series analytics—supporting scalable algorithmic trading technology in a compliant, flexible way. This role includes participation in a global on‑call rota.

What You’ll Do

• Own production reliability for global derivatives trading systems (futures & options), continuously improving stability, resilience, and performance.
• Proactively monitor and troubleshoot complex workflows across development, support, and technical business users; turn quick fixes into robust, scalable solutions.
• Lead incident response to maintain continuous trading operations; drive root‑cause analysis and follow‑up engineering to prevent recurrences.
• Serve as SME for trading systems initiatives, including order capture/execution, allocation, settlement, and compliance requirements.
• Support algorithmic trading platforms within applicable regulations (e.g., EU RTS 6—highly desirable), audit, and compliance frameworks.
• Manage exchange/vendor certifications and integrations with EMS/OMS and third‑party networks (e.g., TT, NYFIX, Bloomberg, TradingScreen).
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with traders, developers, infrastructure, and vendor teams to prioritize reliability improvements.
• Contribute to engineering backlogs, addressing tech debt and implementing systematic improvements to monitoring, deployment, and tooling.
• Participate in a global on‑call rotation, ensuring timely response and clear communication during trading hours and incident events.

Required Industry Knowledge

• Deep understanding of major global futures exchanges and the full exchange‑traded derivatives trade lifecycle.
• 8+ years in Commodity Trading & Capital Markets / Investment Banking, bringing credible external mindset and cost:value competitiveness.
• Knowledge of market data providers (Bloomberg, Refinitiv) and liquidity aggregation platforms.
• 8+ years with Realtime Market Data distribution (enterprise feeds, individual feed handlers).
• 8+ years with time‑series analytic frameworks (e.g., kdb, shakti, or similar technologies).

Key Skills & Experience

• Application deployment best practices with a solid track record in production change management for trading systems.
• 10+ years in Front Office application support and vendor management.
• Rapid incident response capabilities; adept at stabilizing complex systems under time pressure and converting patches into permanent fixes.
• Proactive monitoring & troubleshooting, owning reliability improvements end‑to‑end (design → rollout → validation).
• Strong understanding of trading lifecycle: order capture & execution, allocation workflow, settlement, and compliance.
• Programming & scripting: Python, PowerShell, C#, SQL (others a plus).
• 8+ years of FIX Engineering (session management, certification, troubleshooting, performance tuning).
• Proven experience with exchange/vendor certification processes.
• Familiarity with EMS/OMS and third‑party networks: TT, NYFIX, Bloomberg, TradingScreen.
• Experience with messaging systems and debugging network protocols (e.g., TCP, multicast).
• Market data ops: RTDS (DACS, ADH, ADS components), multicast data traffic management, arbitration, and message queuing.
• Time‑series frameworks: 5+ years supporting kdb/shakti in production (schema design, performance, query optimization).

Soft Skills

• Excellent communication with traders, developers, and stakeholders; clear incident updates and post‑mortems.
• Thrives in high‑pressure environments (trading floor cadence); calm, structured problem‑solver.
• Proactive, self‑motivated, flexible, and outcome‑oriented with a positive, collaborative attitude.
• Comfortable working to demanding deadlines and changing priorities in a trading room context.

Nice to Have

• Experience with algorithmic trading regulation, audit, and compliance (RTS 6 exposure).
• Familiarity with liquidity aggregation, smart order routing, and low‑latency optimization.
• Prior work with observability stacks (metrics, logs, traces) tailored for trading systems (e.g., alerting on market‑critical workflows).

Pay Range: $100hr - $125hr (Depending on experience)

nextSource is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, marital status, parental status, cultural background, organizational level, work styles, tenure, and life experiences or for any other reason.

nextSource is committed to providing reasonable accommodation for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at talent@nextSource.com.

What nextSource Provides:

• Healthcare Benefits including Medical, Prescription, Vision & Dental Coverage | United Healthcare
• Voluntary STD & LTD | New York Life
• 401(k) Retirement Planning | Fidelity
• Discount Program

*You are Eligible to participate in the benefits program if you are considered a full-time employee of nextSource, working at least 30 hours per week on a consistent basis. Your coverage will be effective on the 1st of the month following 60 days of employment.