Market Data Engineer

About Us

Index Bakery is a financial technology company building modern infrastructure for the creation, calculation, and publication of financial indices. Our platform combines index engineering, market data processing, and operational tooling to help institutional clients launch and maintain index products efficiently and reliably.

We work at the intersection of finance, data, and software engineering. Our systems are designed to handle complex market data, support robust index calculations, and provide the transparency, auditability, and reliability required in a production financial environment.

As an early-stage company, we are building both the technology and the organization from the ground up. This creates a hands-on environment where engineers can take real ownership, contribute to core product decisions, and help shape how financial index infrastructure should work in the future.

The Role

We're looking for a Market Data Engineer who thrives on transforming complex market data into clean, validated, and production-ready systems. You'll be responsible for integrating data from multiple vendors, building robust data pipelines, and ensuring that every number can be trusted.

This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, financial market data, and data quality. You do not need to be a financial markets expert from day one, but you should be curious, structured, and eager to learn how market data, instruments, and index calculation processes work in production.

Responsibilities

• Integrate market data from external vendors, exchanges, and internal sources.
• Build, maintain, and improve data ingestion pipelines for prices, reference data, FX rates, corporate actions, calendars, and other market data.
• Normalize heterogeneous data formats into clean, consistent, and well-documented internal data models.
• Implement validation checks, reconciliation logic, and data quality controls to detect missing, stale, inconsistent, or suspicious data.
• Work closely with Index Engineering and Index Operations to ensure data is fit for backtesting, daily index calculation, reporting, and publication.
• Investigate data issues in production and help identify root causes across vendors, pipelines, storage, and downstream systems.
• Design pragmatic solutions for historical data management, versioning, corrections, and auditability of market data.
• Contribute to internal tooling, APIs, monitoring, documentation, and operational workflows around market data.
• Help shape the Market Data Platform as the company grows, balancing speed, reliability, and simplicity.

Requirements

• 3+ years of professional experience in software engineering, data engineering, or a closely related role.
• Strong Python skills and the ability to write clean, maintainable, production-oriented code.
• Solid SQL skills and practical experience working with relational databases.
• Experience building or maintaining data pipelines, ETL/ELT processes, APIs, or backend services.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, ideally GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Understanding of data quality concepts such as validation, reconciliation, completeness checks, and auditability.
• Ability to reason carefully about edge cases, data inconsistencies, and operational failure modes.
• Comfortable working in a small team where ownership, communication, and pragmatic decision-making matter.
• Fluent English communication skills.

Nice to Have

• Experience with financial market data, index data, asset management, trading, exchanges, or data vendors.
• Familiarity with instruments such as equities, bonds, ETFs, commodities, FX, derivatives, or crypto assets.
• Experience with tools such as Docker, FastAPI, Pydantic, Airflow, Dagster, dbt, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, or similar technologies.
• Experience with data historization, slowly changing dimensions, event-based data, or audit trails.
• Experience operating production systems, including monitoring, alerting, incident analysis, and debugging.
• Interest in financial markets, data modelling, and building systems where correctness matters.

What We Value

We care deeply about the mindset you bring to the team. We are looking for someone who is humble, curious, and eager to improve. Someone who enjoys learning new domains, asks thoughtful questions, and is comfortable saying, "I don't know yet, but I'll find out."

We believe great engineers never stop learning. We value intellectual honesty, ownership, and collaboration. We are less interested in people who always have an answer, and more interested in people who are willing to challenge assumptions, learn from others, and continuously grow.

You should enjoy working through messy real-world data problems with patience and precision. We value people who take ownership without ego, communicate clearly, and want to build reliable systems together with a small, ambitious team.

What You'll Work On

At Index Bakery, market data is a core part of our infrastructure. Your work will directly support the calculation, validation, and publication of financial indices. You'll help build the data foundation that enables index backtests, production calculations, client reports, operational checks, and future data products.

This is a hands-on engineering role with real ownership from the beginning.

Location and Requirements

Location: Potsdam office, hybrid work model. Applicants from Berlin and Brandenburg are welcome.

Language: Fluent in English