Graduate Software Engineer (High Performance Systems)

Arctic Lake builds trading technology for tier 1 banks.

They're a small, growing company but appear to have ambitions to grow a lot in the industry.

Over the course of your career at Arctic Lake, you might touch anything from bare-metal optimisation to high-level application logic. You could go deep in systems programming on one project, then own the full lifecycle of an internal tool that transforms how the team works. Throughout it all, you will rely on data analysis.

If you joined them tomorrow, you’d probably work on one of the following:

They are also investing heavily in our staff as they grow, and are looking for people who will be able to grow into leadership roles over the next couple of years.

They prioritise curiosity and learning velocity over perfect credentials. The application says the work is intellectually demanding where the pace varies from "ship fast" to "optimise obsessively" depending on what the problem demands, and you'll be surrounded by people who are genuinely invested in the quality of what they build.

They are a technology company that happens to operate in financial services.

They say they have a strict 'no tech bro' policy: if your work style involves ego-driven posturing, 'crushing it' at the expense of others, or valuing status over empathy, this job isn't right for you.

They have a high ratio of juniors to seniors because they believe that engineers at the start of their careers are smart and capable and aren't held back by limiting beliefs about how things “should” work. This is a feature, not a bug, but it comes with a cost: They do not have a traditional, hand-holding mentorship program.

You will have access to brilliant senior engineers, but you have to drive the interaction. If you wait to be told what to learn next, you will stall. If you are the type to hunt for answers and pull knowledge from those around you, you will fly.

In their words: To keep the playing field fair, our initial coding challenge is in Java.

They use use Java for the test because it is a standard university language that allows us to test your logic and architectural thinking (and a lot of our stack is, in fact, in Java).

However, once you are there, you will be exposed to a diverse tech stack including Python, TypeScript, SystemVerilog (for FPGAs), Raft, Kubernetes, DLT, Angular, and more.