Python Software Engineer

Senior Python Software Engineer – Front Office (Commodities Trading)

Location: Houston, TX (4 days a week in the office)
Type: 12-month contract
Rate: $100–$130/hr
Sponsorship: Not available. Candidates must already be authorised to work in the US.

The role

We’re working with a leading global commodities trading firm that is hiring a Senior Python Software Engineer for its Houston front office technology team. You’ll sit with traders, analysts and quants, and you’ll own the applications that support real-time trading decisions from start to finish: design, build, deployment and support in production. The team needs a hands-on engineer who can work across the whole stack, translate business needs into technical solutions, and ship quickly in a fast-moving trading environment.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain production-grade front office applications in Python, covering the backend services, APIs and front-end interfaces
• Build scalable, event-driven systems and real-time data pipelines with Kafka or RabbitMQ
• Develop cloud-native services on AWS (e.g. Lambda, ECS/EKS, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS) with a focus on performance, reliability and cost
• Build responsive trading UIs, dashboards and analytics tools in React and TypeScript
• Design and build RESTful APIs and microservices (FastAPI, Flask or similar) that connect to market data, trade capture, positions, risk and P&L systems
• Ingest, transform and model large volumes of market and fundamental data using pandas, NumPy and SQL (PostgreSQL, Snowflake or similar)
• Integrate quantitative models and analytics into production applications
• Own CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, monitoring, logging and alerting
• Containerise and deploy applications with Docker and Kubernetes, and manage infrastructure as code with Terraform, CloudFormation or CDK
• Work directly with traders and stakeholders to gather requirements, prioritise work and deliver rapid prototypes
• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues in a time-critical trading environment
• Contribute to architecture decisions, code reviews and engineering best practice across the team

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with Python as your primary language
• Required: experience in commodities or energy trading (power, gas, oil, LNG or similar), ideally in a front office environment
• Strong AWS experience building and deploying cloud-native applications
• Hands-on front-end development with React (TypeScript preferred)
• Experience with messaging and streaming technologies such as Kafka or RabbitMQ
• Strong SQL skills and experience with relational databases
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, microservices and event-driven architecture
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Git and CI/CD tooling
• Understanding of trading workflows such as trade capture, positions, risk, P&L and market data
• Excellent communication skills and confidence working directly with traders
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience

Nice to have

• Plotly Dash, Streamlit or other Python visualisation frameworks
• Snowflake, Databricks or Airflow
• Exposure to quantitative analytics, pricing or backtesting frameworks
• AWS certifications