Market Data Engineer

Role summary

Index Bakery is a financial technology company focused on building modern infrastructure for creating, calculating, and publishing financial indices. The company brings together index engineering, market data handling, and operational tooling to help institutional clients launch and run index products with speed, control, and reliability.

This position is for a Market Data Engineer based in the Potsdam office with a hybrid working setup. Candidates from Berlin and Brandenburg are welcome. English fluency is required.

You will work at the intersection of software engineering, financial market data, and data quality. The team is looking for someone who can take complex market data, turn it into dependable production systems, and ensure the numbers are accurate, traceable, and usable in real-world index operations. Deep financial markets expertise is not mandatory on day one, but curiosity, structure, and a willingness to learn are essential.

What the company is building

The platform is designed to support demanding production use cases in finance, including robust index calculations, market data processing, and strong auditability. As an early-stage company, Index Bakery is still shaping both its technology and its organization, giving engineers meaningful ownership over product direction, technical decisions, and engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Connect market data from vendors, exchanges, and internal systems.
• Develop, support, and refine ingestion pipelines for prices, reference data, FX rates, corporate actions, calendars, and related inputs.
• Convert different data formats into standardized internal data models that are clean, consistent, and well documented.
• Create validation rules, reconciliation logic, and quality checks to identify gaps, stale values, inconsistencies, and suspicious records.
• Partner with Index Engineering and Index Operations to make sure data is suitable for backtesting, daily calculations, reporting, and publication.
• Analyze production data issues and trace root causes across vendors, pipelines, storage layers, and downstream applications.
• Build practical approaches for historical data handling, version control, corrections, and audit trails.
• Contribute to internal tools, APIs, monitoring, documentation, and operational processes around market data.
• Help evolve the market data platform as the business scales, keeping the balance between speed, simplicity, and reliability.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of professional experience in software engineering, data engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Strong Python programming ability with a track record of writing clean and maintainable production code.
• Good SQL knowledge and hands-on experience with relational databases.
• Experience creating or supporting data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, APIs, or backend services.
• Working familiarity with cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Understanding of data quality concepts including validation, reconciliation, completeness checks, and auditability.
• Careful analytical thinking when dealing with edge cases, data mismatches, and operational failure scenarios.
• Comfort in a small team environment where ownership, communication, and practical decision-making are important.
• Ability to communicate fluently in English.

Nice to have

• Exposure to financial market data, index data, asset management, trading, exchanges, or data vendors.
• Familiarity with asset classes such as equities, bonds, ETFs, commodities, FX, derivatives, or crypto assets.
• Experience with Docker, FastAPI, Pydantic, Airflow, Dagster, dbt, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, or similar tools.
• Background in data historization, slowly changing dimensions, event-driven data, or audit trails.
• Experience running production systems, including monitoring, alerting, incident review, and debugging.
• Genuine interest in financial markets, data modelling, and systems where correctness is critical.

What the team values

The team values humility, curiosity, and a strong desire to keep improving. They are looking for someone who enjoys learning unfamiliar domains, asks thoughtful questions, and is comfortable admitting when they need to investigate further.

Ownership, intellectual honesty, and collaboration matter more than pretending to know everything. The ideal person is willing to challenge assumptions, learn from colleagues, and grow continuously.

Working through messy real-world data problems with patience and precision is important. The team prefers people who take responsibility without ego, communicate clearly, and want to build dependable systems alongside a small, ambitious group.

What you will work on

Your work will directly support the calculation, validation, and publication of financial indices. You will help build the data foundation behind index backtests, production calculations, client reports, operational checks, and future data products.

This is a practical engineering role with genuine ownership from day one.

Work location and language

The role is based in Potsdam with a hybrid work model. Applicants located in Berlin or Brandenburg are welcome to apply. Fluent English is required for day-to-day communication.