Principal Engineer

Who you are

• A track record of leading data QA or data quality teams, preferably on market data or other high-throughput, real-time data
• A deep understanding of streaming and API behaviour: throughput, WebSocket semantics, ordering, recovery and failure modes
• Experience inventorying and testing a large API and data surface end to end
• Hands-on experience with data governance: cataloging, lineage, ownership
• Experience with performance and load testing of distributed systems
• A strong engineering background. You design platforms, not scripts on a cron job, and you build on shared infrastructure rather than creating one-off tooling
• Practical experience applying LLM and agentic tooling to engineering problems
• Our stack: Flink, Doris, Dagster and Spark, plus OpenMetadata (or an equivalent such as Apache Atlas). Experience with comparable tools is just as relevant

What the job involves

• You'll own data correctness across Talos. You'll lead the data quality engineering team, run BAU data operations, and own reference and security master data, along with the pipelines and platform that deliver it
• Our goal: the data we return to clients is always correct, and we find defects before a client does
• You'll join a small team with the mandate to work independently from product engineering and challenge it
• Engineering teams make assumptions about how their systems behave. Your job is to test those assumptions and prove or disprove them with evidence
• Lead AI-first data quality engineering
• Validate every client-facing endpoint continuously. The focus is our REST and WebSocket APIs. Cloud delivery (S3, Snowflake, Databricks) is also in scope. Assert correctness against independent sources of truth, across every environment and client entitlement
• Cover streaming as well as request/response. For WebSocket, that means:
• Sequencing and gap detection
• Snapshot-to-increment consistency
• Reconnect and replay correctness
• Staleness of live subscriptions
• Agreement between the streamed view and the REST view of the same state
• Use adaptive detection, not static thresholds. Learn baselines per endpoint and per market, and let them adjust as "normal" changes. Hand-set limits get noisy, go stale, and teach people to ignore alerts
• Apply LLM and agentic tooling to generate checks from API specs and schemas, keep them current as the product changes, and triage alerts before a human sees them. Know when a deterministic rule, invariant or cross-source reconciliation is the better tool
• Test resilience and load. Design load, performance and failure-mode tests
• When you find a fault, raise it with the owning team with enough evidence for them to act. Drive it to resolution, then add a check that would have caught it earlier
• Measure and publish endpoint and field coverage, time to detect, detected-before-client rate and false-positive rate
• Run data governance
• Build and maintain a catalog of our data assets and APIs, covering lineage and downstream consumers. Maintain an understanding of assets, how they're used and what breaks when they change
• Own data governance tooling such as OpenMetadata
• Own reference and security master data
• Lead the build-out of the next-generation security master platform, then run it day to day: new listings, symbol mapping across venues, and increment and contract specs
• Design processes for safe updates to security entries, with validation and rollback
• Expand coverage across the firm
• Over time, extend data quality coverage beyond client APIs to:
• Trade signals
• Pre-trade analytics
• Client post-trade analysis
• PMS analytics

Benefits

• Retirement plan contribution
• Bonus and stock ownership plan
• Medical, dental, vision insurance
• Unlimited Vacation + PTO Bonus: Talos provides their employees with unlimited PTO. Employees that take 15 days of vacation, with 5 days being consecutive, receive a $2000 USD bonus.
• Paid parental leave for 20 weeks
• Genuine flexible working; Typically dependent on the team, but it's encouraged for employees to discuss flexible working options with their manager
• Global offsites and team outings
• Family building & reproductive care support
• Home office stipend: Talos Employees receive a one-time stipend towards their at home office set-up.
• Cycle to work scheme for our London office
• Wellness Credit: Talos employees are provided with a wellness credit of $50 USD accrued monthly, to go towards things like gym memberships, ski passes, massages, and work out classes
• Talos employees receive a credit of $25 USD towards their lunch, when they are in office.
• Donation matching up to $100 USD annually
• FSA & HSA benefits
• One of our core goals is simple: "Be the best place to work, seriously.” Everything we offer is built with that in mind.

At Talos, benefits are designed to support your whole life—not just your role. That means comprehensive healthcare (including dental, vision, and mental health support), financial support for family planning, and up to five months of fully paid parental leave so you can plan for the future with confidence. You’ll also have the flexibility to work in a way that suits you, with a hybrid model, a generous home office setup budget, and unlimited holiday—plus a $2,000 bonus to encourage you to actually take it. On top of that, every employee receives a company card with pre-loaded budgets, including $450 per month for meals and coffees, and $600 per year in wellness credit to spend on whatever helps you feel your best.

Day to day, the experience is designed to feel energising, social, and sustainable. Whether it’s fitness sessions, cycle-to-work schemes, team lunches, or regular socials and offsites, there are plenty of ways to stay active and connected. Alongside this, we prioritise financial security through pension contributions, income protection, and comprehensive insurance—so you can focus on doing great work in a genuinely supportive and inclusive environment.