Ambition Hiring! Full Time Senior C-- Systems Engineer - Memory Management - Database Internals in - Ricebowl

A leading global quantitative investment firm is looking for a Senior C++ Systems Engineer with deep expertise in low-level programming, memory management, database internals, and high-performance computing.

This is not a standard application-development role. You will work close to the operating system and hardware, solving complex engineering challenges involving memory allocation, concurrency, storage, data access, and large-scale computation. The systems you build will support quantitative research and portfolio-management workflows where performance, scalability, and reliability are critical.

The firm is undertaking a multi-year transformation of its core technology platform, offering the opportunity to take ownership of technically challenging projects and influence the design of its next generation of research infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and develop high-performance, production-quality systems in modern C++ on Linux.
• Build low-level components supporting large-scale data processing, research, and computational workloads.
• Optimise memory allocation, data structures, CPU utilisation, storage access, and overall system performance.
• Investigate memory leaks, fragmentation, contention, latency, and other complex performance bottlenecks.
• Design scalable systems for storing, accessing, and processing large datasets.
• Develop multithreaded and concurrent applications using efficient synchronisation and memory-management techniques.
• Improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of existing distributed systems.
• Conduct detailed profiling, benchmarking, debugging, and root-cause analysis.
• Take ownership of complex technical challenges from architecture and design through to production.
• Collaborate with software engineers, quantitative researchers, and portfolio managers.

Required Skills and Experience

• At least 7 years of professional C++ software-development experience.
• Strong production experience with modern C++ on Linux.
• Deep understanding of low-level programming and Linux systems programming.
• Strong knowledge of memory allocation, object lifecycles, memory layouts, pointers, cache behaviour, and resource management.
• Excellent understanding of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, multithreading, and performance optimisation.
• Experience building high-performance, data-intensive, or large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of database concepts, including storage, indexing, query performance, caching, and efficient data access.
• Experience using profiling and debugging tools to diagnose CPU, memory, concurrency, and I/O bottlenecks.
• Ability to write clean, reliable, and highly efficient production code.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently with minimal direction.

Highly Desirable Experience

• Database internals, storage engines, indexing, or query-processing systems.
• Custom memory allocators, lock-free programming, or zero-copy techniques.
• CPU cache optimisation, NUMA-aware programming, or hardware-conscious software design.
• High-performance computing or performance-sensitive backend platforms.
• Large-scale graph computation or graph-based data systems.
• Streaming, dataflow, or real-time data-processing platforms.
• Python development and C++/Python integration.
• Working with very large datasets in computationally intensive environments.

Why Apply?

• Work on challenging problems involving C++, Linux, memory, databases, concurrency, and distributed computing.
• Build core systems supporting large-scale quantitative research and investment operations.
• Contribute to a major multi-year redevelopment of a global technology platform.
• Collaborate with highly technical engineers, researchers, and portfolio managers.
• Join an intellectually driven environment that values technical depth, ownership, and original thinking.
• Previous experience in financial services is not required.
• Highly competitive compensation with a performance-based bonus.

This role would suit a senior C++ engineer who enjoys working beneath the application layer and has a genuine interest in how systems manage memory, storage, computation, concurrency, and data at scale.