You build or run the systems a desk trades through, and you are weighing where the real seats are. The titles across Sydney look alike: trading systems engineer, market data developer, low-latency engineer, platform lead. The seats behind them are not. Some put you a few metres from a P&L and pay you on it. Choosing on title and base salary is how good engineers end up in the wrong room for three years.
The shape of the market
Six groups employ almost everyone: the four majors and Macquarie, with the largest markets technology functions in the country; the non-bank market makers and proprietary firms, small, engineering-led and competing on latency; the FX and CFD brokers and markets fintechs, running high-volume flow through client platforms they built themselves; the buy-side dealing desks at super funds and asset managers, growing as more execution comes in-house; the exchanges and market infrastructure providers that everyone else connects to; and the vendors whose order management, execution, market data and risk systems sit inside most of those shops.
Because the pool is small, reputations travel: useful if your work is good, unforgiving if you have moved every year without shipping anything.
What each seat involves and what it rewards
The sell-side bank. Scale, regulation and a legacy estate running alongside what is replacing it. It rewards reliability and getting change through the control functions. The bonus follows the division and the firm more than your desk.
The non-bank market maker or proprietary firm. Small teams, direct ownership, a short line between your code and the firm’s result. It rewards engineering rigour, comfort with being paged, and knowing which microsecond matters. The bonus follows desk and firm performance and can be a large share of the total.
The FX or CFD broker and the markets fintech. Pricing engines, client platforms, risk and hedging at volume. It rewards product sense and throughput engineering. Build phases are often contracted; permanent roles may carry equity rather than a bonus.
The buy-side dealing desk. Order and execution management, integration across vendor systems. More vendor management and a premium on understanding the investment process. Pay is steadier and the bonus follows the fund.
The exchange or market infrastructure provider. Matching, clearing, settlement and market data distribution. It rewards rigour and resilience engineering.
The vendor. Product engineering across many clients. It rewards breadth and product thinking, and it is a good route to a desk seat later.
How pay is structured
Base, bonus and, for contractors, a day rate. On the sell-side, base is the larger part and the bonus comes from a divisional pool, often partly deferred. At the non-banks the bonus is tied to desk and firm P&L; in a strong year it can exceed the base, in a weak year it will not. Contractors carry the premium in the day rate and receive no bonus, and the rate is set by scarcity and phase.
We will tell you where a specific seat sits against the market when we talk. A number published here would be out of date within a quarter.
What the market values
Production systems under load: not systems you worked on, systems you carried while the desk traded through them. Incidents owned: what broke, what you did, what changed. Latency or throughput work with a measurable result: “reduced latency” means nothing, the p99 before and after means everything. And the trading workflow: the order lifecycle, what the trader is trying to do, where the risk sits. Engineers who understand the desk get hired over engineers who understand only the stack.
The moves that hold up, and the ones that stall
Bank to non-bank holds up when you bring a production record and can operate without the bank’s scaffolding. Vendor to desk holds up when you bring the domain knowledge. Contract to permanent holds up when you convert on a build you landed.
The stalls are predictable. Moving on title alone into a seat where you own nothing. Chasing the biggest bonus onto a desk with a falling P&L.
How to read a role before you take it
Ask who owns the platform, the desk, the technology function or a vendor, because that decides how much of the result is yours. Ask whether the seat is build or run and what funds the headcount. Ask about the desk’s P&L trajectory: is the firm investing in this business or managing it? Ask what happened to the last person in the seat.
Positioning, referees and the honest read
Write the narrative as evidence: systems carried, incidents owned, measurable results. Choose referees from the people who depended on your system, a head of desk or a trader, as well as the engineering lead you reported to.
The two sides read the same CV differently. Sell-side readers look for scale, control and change delivered in a regulated environment. Buy-side readers look for integration, vendor judgement and an understanding of the investment process. We recruit into trading and markets technology, and the founder has worked both sides of the street in financial services, sell-side investment banking and buy-side wealth and super, so we know which version of your story each room needs to hear.
When an engineer in this market asks us where the real seats are, we give a straight answer: which of the six groups you are credible with now and what would add the rest. We list live roles, but most of the people we appoint in this market were not looking when we rang.
Questions candidates ask
No. The non-banks, brokers, fintechs, exchanges and vendors hire on evidence of production systems carried and workflow understood, and some of them prefer engineers who have not picked up the bank’s habits. A bank background helps most when you are moving to another bank, or to a buy-side desk that values experience with control functions.
Neither is better; they suit different phases. Contract pays a premium for build work with a hard date and carries no bonus. Permanent pays less day to day and more in the bonus and in the ownership that leads to lead and head-of seats. The strongest careers we see mix the two deliberately, converting to permanent on builds the person landed.
Base salaries for senior engineers are broadly comparable. The difference is at the top of the bonus range, where the larger firms and desks in London and Singapore can pay totals Sydney rarely matches, because the Sydney firms and desks are smaller. Against that, the pool here is small enough that a good reputation carries further, and seats with real ownership come earlier than they tend to in the larger markets.
More from Altura
Cloud, Security & EngineeringA bench you have worked with before: contract hiring for cloud, platform and markets technology
Specialist contractors for cloud, platform, cyber and trading technology, screened on the work they did, not the keywords. Two or three people…
Data & AIFrom data engineer to AI lead: the moves that hold up in this market
You build the pipelines and the models and want to lead the function. What the market weights now, the moves that hold…
Data & AIAI that has to get past the pilot: who you actually need, and in what order
Your AI pilots worked in the demo and stalled before production. Why that happens, who you actually need to fix it, and…