Senior FPGA Engineer

Our client is an exceptional proprietary trading firm seeking a talented Senior FPGA Engineer to join a high-performing engineering team responsible for building the ultra-low-latency technology that powers global trading operations. Recognised for its technology-first culture, entrepreneurial mindset, and continued investment in quantitative trading infrastructure, the firm operates at the forefront of modern financial markets. This is an outstanding opportunity for a Senior FPGA Engineer to work on mission-critical trading systems where every nanosecond matters and engineering excellence is a genuine competitive advantage.

They are looking for a Senior FPGA Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with a proactive, ownership-driven mindset. The ideal FPGA Engineer will thrive in a fast-paced trading environment, enjoy solving highly complex performance challenges, and be motivated by the opportunity to build systems that directly impact trading outcomes. This role would suit an ambitious FPGA Engineer who enjoys collaborating with world-class researchers, traders, and software engineers while taking a leading role in shaping next-generation trading infrastructure. A successful FPGA Engineer will be highly analytical, naturally curious, and passionate about pushing the boundaries of hardware performance.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and develop ultra-low-latency FPGA trading systems supporting global equities and futures markets.
• Lead the design and implementation of high-performance FPGA firmware for market data processing and order execution.
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for FPGA-based trading infrastructure.
• Partner closely with quantitative researchers, software engineers, and network engineers to deliver high-performance trading platforms.
• Build scalable, reusable FPGA architectures supporting multiple exchange venues and trading strategies.
• Optimise latency, throughput, and overall system performance across production trading environments.
• Design robust testing frameworks and deployment processes to ensure reliability and operational excellence.
• Drive innovation across hardware acceleration, exchange connectivity, and trading system performance.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to other FPGA engineers within the team.

Key Skills & Experience

• 5+ years of hands-on experience as an FPGA Engineer, ideally within proprietary trading, market making, HFT, or electronic trading environments.
• Expert-level SystemVerilog development experience targeting Xilinx FPGA platforms.
• Proven experience designing and optimising ultra-low-latency hardware systems.
• Strong understanding of networking protocols including 10G Ethernet, multicast, MAC, and PCS layers.
• Experience building FPGA solutions for market data feed handling, order execution, and real-time processing environments.
• Strong performance tuning, debugging, and optimisation capabilities.
• Ability to design scalable architecture and influence technical direction across projects.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with experience working directly with traders, quantitative researchers, and software engineering teams.
• Prior technical leadership or mentoring experience is highly desirable.
• Strong preference for candidates from proprietary trading firms, market makers, hedge funds, electronic trading firms, or other latency-sensitive financial markets environments.
• Experience working with exchange connectivity, market data feeds, and high-performance networking technologies would be highly advantageous.

This is a rare opportunity for a Senior FPGA Engineer to join a highly respected trading firm where technology sits at the core of the business. You'll work on cutting-edge FPGA systems, tackle some of the most challenging latency and performance problems in the industry, and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of a world-class trading platform alongside some of the best engineers in the market.