Smarkets

Please note: Profiles will be reviewed starting in January, and shortlisted candidates will be contacted thereafter. Who are we? Smarkets: Predicting the Future of Betting Smarkets runs one of the world's most sophisticated prediction markets, handling over £29 billion in volume since 2010 and engaging 200,000+ traders globally. We're a technology company that happens to revolutionise betting - from sports to political markets, to delivering the sharpest prices and the fairest odds. Our stack is designed for scale, reliability, and speed: Linux, Kafka, Postgres, Kubernetes, with Python 3, C+, and React powering our platform. We build infrastructure that institutions trust while keeping trading accessible to everyone. Our edge? We've thrived through every market cycle, competitor, and industry revolution. At the heart of our success are our people. We create a high-performance environment where exceptional talent can thrive, blending deep business experience with a commercial mindset to drive strategic growth. If you're ready to help shape the future of prediction markets with cutting edge technology and a customer first philosophy, Smarkets is where you belong. The Team We are a lean, highly strategic team focused on enabling company success through efficient systems and people first solutions. We are moving towards automation and advanced tooling to build a world class, self service employee experience. Team members operate with autonomy and are encouraged to challenge the status quo, constantly seeking innovative ways to improve. We thrive on creative problem solving, viewing resilience and experimentation as key to achieving our ambitious roadmap. About the Role We are seeking a highly experienced and uniquely talented Senior Talent Partner to join our team. This role requires both strategic vision and rigorous, hands on execution. You will own the recruitment lifecycle of your pipelines, responsible for attracting, assessing, and hiring the technical and G&A talent that will define our future success. This is not a passive role, you'll headhunt people to build our pipelines. We are looking for a true partner who understands the nuance of building exceptional engineering teams and has the grit and proven ability to operate effectively without a large support infrastructure. What you will do: Talent Strategy & Partnership (30%) Strategic Planning: Act as a trusted partner to the Leadership Team and Hiring Managers, developing and executing a data driven talent acquisition strategy aligned with our goals. Technical Bar Ownership: Define, articulate, and maintain our exceptionally high technical and cultural bar. Continuously refine assessment methods to ensure we hire individuals who thrive in a complex, fast moving environment. Employer Branding: Champion and articulate the company's value proposition to the external market, particularly within the competitive London tech landscape. Full Cycle Recruitment & Execution (70%) Sourcing & Headhunting: Execute proactive, advanced sourcing strategies (not just relying on job boards) to build deep pipelines for highly specialised and hard to fill technical roles. Candidate Experience: Own and deliver a best in class, personalised candidate experience from initial contact through offer acceptance. Screening & Assessment: Conduct in depth, competency based screening interviews, effectively serving as the initial technical and cultural filter for all candidates. Offer Negotiation: Manage complex offer negotiations, compensation benchmarking, and closing strategies. Role Requirements: Must Have Experience & Qualifications Experience (12+ Years): A minimum of 12 years of progressive experience in technical recruitment, specifically within the high growth tech/startup environment. Startup/Standalone Expertise: Proven experience operating as a standalone internal recruiter or successfully managing the entire recruitment lifecycle (end to end) within an agency environment, demonstrating deep self sufficiency and resourcefulness. Technical Acumen: Deep, demonstrable understanding of modern software development, architecture, and tech stacks common in Series B companies (e.g., Cloud technologies, modern programming languages, data engineering). London Tech Market: Established network and expert knowledge of the London/UK technical talent landscape. Nice to have: Previous experience hiring technical and operational talents in the East Coast. Skills & Attributes Strategic & Hands On: A unique ability to toggle seamlessly between long term strategic thinking and the immediate, hands on execution of sourcing and candidate management. Impact Driven: Highly analytical and uses data (source of hire, time to hire, quality of hire) to drive efficiency and decision making. Exceptional Communicator: Polished, persuasive, and empathetic communication skills necessary to engage with both C level executives and technical talent. Accountable and ownership driven: Possesses a deep sense of ownership for the entire recruitment lifecycle, ensuring exceptional candidate management and outcomes. Our Values Push to Win: We set ambitious goals and relentlessly pursue them, always striving for excellence. Make Others Better: We lift each other up, share knowledge, and celebrate team success over individual achievement. Give a Shit: We care deeply about our work, our users, and the impact we make. Be a Pro: We take ownership, act with integrity, and consistently deliver to a high standard. Bring the Energy: We bring positivity, curiosity, and enthusiasm to everything we do, inspiring those around us. Culture Fit: These values define how we succeed as a team. If this isn't you, this may not be the right place. We hire people who thrive in a fast paced, collaborative, and ambitious environment. Perks & Benefits We offer a competitive salary and benefits package, alongside a dynamic, collaborative environment where your work truly makes an impact and your voice is heard. Our team is diverse, driven, and ambitious - united by a strong work ethic and a hunger to innovate and win. Our benefits are designed around Health, Wealth, and Development, supporting you both professionally and personally. These include: Stock Options: Vest over 4 years, your success is our success. Pension Scheme: Competitive plan via Aviva, with up to 6% matched contributions if you opt in. Health Insurance: Comprehensive coverage to keep you and your family healthy. Enhanced Parental Leave: Enhanced maternity and paternity leave to support you through life's most important moments. Stay Fuelled: Enjoy fresh, chef made breakfast and lunch every day, plus a constant supply of fruit, snacks, tea, coffee and soft drinks, because great work starts with great food. Cycle to Work Scheme: Support for sustainable commuting and staying active. Learning & Development: £1,000 annual education budget for courses, conferences, books, or training. Holiday: 25 days paid leave + bank holidays, with the option to carry over 5 days. Flexible Working: Hybrid model with 3 days in the office and 2 days from home to fit your lifestyle. Global Working: Work from anywhere in the world for up to 20 days a year. Team Energy: Regular socials, hackathons, and events - because collaboration and fun go hand in hand. What happens next We aim to have a simple and speedy hiring process and we want to make sure that we are right for you as much as the other way around. CV application review - We will review it as quickly as possible. Let's chat - Quick chat with our team about your experience and the role. Hiring Manager - Meet your Line Manager for an Experience & Mindset Interview. Take Home Task - At home task to show off your skills. In Office Interview - Lunch with other colleagues in the team + Chats. Diversity & Inclusion We're an equal opportunities employer and celebrate diversity in all its forms. If you need any adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know - we're happy to accommodate your needs.

A leading betting exchange platform based in Greater London is looking for a DevOps Engineer to scale its cloud infrastructure. The ideal candidate will possess deep experience with AWS, Terraform, and Kubernetes, and will drive the internal developer platform and infrastructure improvements. With a focus on engineering excellence, this role offers a dynamic work environment and competitive benefits including stock options, health insurance, and flexible working arrangements.

Smarkets is a betting exchange for sports and political events that has handled £37 billion in traded volume since 2010. Our goal is to fix the sports betting industry by creating a transparent platform that offers the best value for users, with not only the best odds but also the latest technology, alongside an amazing customer experience. The Role As a Senior Software Engineer in our Engineering organisation, you are leading a team of software engineers who build, manage, and maintain the services for Smarkets' core exchange functionalities that power our main products Exchange and SBK. You are here to help organize the direction of your team, guide their career growth, and ensure that we're building the right stack to power the future of our products. You will be responsible for leveraging your team to ensure that our services are responsive, scalable, and performant. Ultimately, you will be working alongside your team of engineers, engineering managers, and product managers, to drive the complex technical projects that help deliver the Smarkets product roadmap. The successful candidate will initially take over technical leadership of the team and will transition to a tech lead manager position later. The Team We design, develop, deploy and operate the real-time distributed exchange systems that run 24/7 all year long. Our responsibilities include order matching, pricing feed, activity journaling, settlements, risk management and dissemination of market data. We care a lot about reliability, fault tolerance, throughput, and latency. Our high availability requirements dictate emphasis on testability and reproducibility alongside monitoring and alerting. Our tech stack includes Rust (low-latency distributed services), Python (property based testing and scripting) and parts written in C++ and Erlang which are gradually decommissioned. We use Postgres as our main DBMS technology and Apache Kafka for queuing. Our CI is based on Nix and we ship daily to production. You will be joining the team in a pivotal moment as we are transitioning from a monolithic architecture of our core exchange infrastructure to horizontally scalable architecture which can handle 10'000+ orders per second. In details, you will: Engineer and optimise exchange solutions, focusing on but not limited to scalability, low latency, reliability, monitoring, security and automation Drive sprint planning, including proper scoping of tasks, and execution of the roadmap delivery goals, working alongside our Product Management function Set the standard for quality engineering, including improving our engineering processes, to keep our level of excellence high Collaborate with other leads and engineering managers, and other stakeholders in the implementation and future development of product roadmap Be proactive during incident management with hands on troubleshooting Be the champion of the stack by demonstrating first hand how to implement functionalities in the right way, with an eye to the horizon and your mind on the present Ensure the career growth of the engineers in your team as they advance in seniority Represent the team in cross functional meetings and internal events Articulate the company vision and strategy to the team; the "why", the business case, context, benefits any constraints etc We'd love to talk if you have: Previous experience leading and delivering projects in an IC capacity Proven leadership skills, and interest in building and managing technical teams 6-8 plus years' experience in designing, developing, and implementing distributed systems Can demonstrate deep knowledge in running services in cloud microservice environments and hands on experience with Kubernetes Familiarity with AWS cloud Familiarity with observability principles and tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Sentry Elastic-search, Jaeger) Excellent planning and communications skills and able to lead conversations with development and product teams Preferred Skills and Experience 6-8+ years of experience building services for low-latency and high-scale products 5+ years of experience working with a compiled language - Rust is preferable, but experience with C++ or Go and interest to learn Rust is also acceptable Previous experience leading a team technically or directly Proven track record working in agile environments Demonstrable experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (IaC) using tools like Terraform and Gitlab CI Our Values Push to win Make others better Give a shit Be a pro Bring the energy Our values are at the heart of everything that we do. We believe these are the fundamentals to ensure we are delivering what's expected of us in the best way possible for ourselves and for those around us Benefits We offer a competitive salary package and benefits, along with a dynamic and collaborative work environment. Your work with us will make an impact and your voice will be heard. We are a diverse team with a strong work ethic and plenty of hunger to win. We have designed our benefits offering around Health, Wealth, Lifestyle and Development. These include: Stock options which vests over 4 years Pension scheme - An impressive pension scheme via Aviva. We will match 6% if you choose the same Health insurance Fresh fruit and snacks provided in the office everyday! (tea, coffee, soft drinks also included) We're a member of a cycle to work scheme We want to continue to invest in all our employees and do so by providing a £1000 yearly education budget that can be used on courses, conferences, books or training 25 days paid holiday + bank holidays to enjoy - you have the choice to carry over 5 days to the next year! Flexible working - we want to provide a hybrid model approach to working and provide you with 2 days a week working from home 20 days a year of global working - we provide the ability to work from anywhere in the world for up to 20 days a year We will provide you lunch everyday in the office - you don't need to worry about feeding your belly as we have it sorted with top quality food served by our in house Chef Alex! What happens next We aim to have a simple and speedy hiring process and we want to make sure that we are right for you as much as the other way around. CV application review - We will review it as quickly as possible Let's chat - Quick chat with our team about your experience and the role Experience and Mindset Chat - with the Hiring Manager Technical Interview - Live Coding Pair Programming + System Design Interview In Office Interview - LT chat + Lunch with other colleagues in the team

A leading betting exchange company is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead a team focused on building scalable and reliable services. You will manage projects, drive sprint planning, and collaborate with product management. Ideal candidates will have 6-8+ years in distributed system design, hands-on experience with Kubernetes, and proven leadership skills. The role includes competitive salary, stock options, flexible working, and a strong emphasis on employee development.

Who Are We? Smarkets is transforming the betting exchange space by delivering world-class technology and the best-priced markets in the industry. With over £29 billion in traded volume since 2010, we've built a product-led, transparent, and fair platform that challenges the norms of traditional betting. As a Series B tech company, we pride ourselves on engineering excellence, lean product thinking, and scientific rigor. With a close-knit team and a passion for innovation, Smarkets is where top talent comes to make a real impact. Now, we're looking for a DevOps Engineer to help scale our infrastructure and empower our developers with streamlined, self-service tooling and operational excellence. About the Role You'll join the Cloud Infrastructure Team, responsible for real-time distributed systems that power our trading engine-As a pivotal team member, you'll craft and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performance cloud-based systems-while building the platforms that empower our developers to move fast, deploy confidently, and scale effortlessly. You won't just be building cloud infrastructure-you'll be crafting a highly autonomous environment where ownership is expected, experimentation is encouraged, and innovation is embedded into everything we do. You'll shape the foundation of our cloud-native stack, blending visionary infrastructure architecture with the practical realities of a high-growth, high-scale environment. This is a role where infrastructure meets engineering productivity: part DevOps, part Platform, 100% mission-critical. What You'll Do Design and Own Infrastructure: Architect and maintain robust, cost-effective, and secure infrastructure on AWS using Terraform, Kubernetes, and cloud-native best practices. Champion Platform Engineering: Build and evolve the internal developer platform (IDP) that empowers engineers to self-serve infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and security tooling. Debug Production Systems: Triage issues across layers of the stack-Kubernetes, cloud services, networking, applications, data pipelines-and drive root cause analysis and resolution. Drive DevOps Practices: Implement infrastructure as code (IaC), observability, alerting, and environment provisioning to support engineering teams and production systems. Promote Engineering Excellence: Establish and uphold standards and best practices across infrastructure, operations, and software delivery. Scale Microservices Architecture: Lead the buildout of resilient Kubernetes-based microservices across environments, optimizing for cost, performance, and security. Own Security & Compliance: Take point on security posture and audits (SOC 2, ISO 27001), ensuring our platforms meet rigorous compliance and operational standards. System Reliability: Optimize performance and availability for high-throughput, low-latency services that power the betting exchange. Be a Force Multiplier: Mentor other engineers, drive cross-team alignment, and lead initiatives with broad technical and business impact. Your Toolkit Cloud & Infrastructure: Deep experience with AWS (EKS, VPC, EC2, S3, IAM, RDS), Terraform (IaC), and Linux systems. Containers & Orchestration: Kubernetes expertise, including Helm, ingress configuration, scaling strategies, and security hardening. Scripting & Automation: Strong skills in Python and Bash; automation is your second nature. Networking & Security: Proficiency in VPNs, VPC peering, DNS, TLS, and identity management (OIDC/SAML). Observability & Operations: Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, ELK stack, Sentry, and building robust monitoring/alerting pipelines. Developer Platform Tools: Hands-on with GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, Backstage, or similar IDP tooling to build cohesive internal platforms. Data Infrastructure: Experience supporting PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and object storage like S3 in production environments. Process & Compliance: Familiarity with security frameworks, incident response, RBAC/least privilege models, and compliance workflows. Bonus if you have Experience with platform engineering concepts like golden paths, self-service portals, or PaaS-style abstractions. Built or contributed to developer enablement or SRE tooling platforms. Prior experience scaling platform infrastructure in a fast-growing startup environment. What You Bring 6+ years in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, or platform engineering roles. Proven ability to balance long-term vision with short-term execution. A collaborative spirit that uplifts others and fosters strong technical culture. Passion for reliability, scalability, and simplicity in infrastructure. Our Values Push to win Make others better Give a shit Be a pro Bring the energy Our values are at the heart of everything that we do. We believe these are the fundamentals to ensure we are delivering what's expected of us in the best way possible for ourselves and for those around us. Benefits We offer a competitive salary package and benefits, along with a dynamic and collaborative work environment. Your work with us will make an impact and your voice will be heard. We are a diverse team with a strong work ethic and plenty of hunger to win. We have designed our benefits offering around Health, Wealth, Lifestyle and Development. These include: Stock options which vests over 4 years Pension scheme - an impressive pension scheme via Aviva. We will match 6% if you choose the same Health insurance Fresh fruit and snacks provided in the office everyday! (tea, coffee and soft drinks also included) We're a member of a cycle to work scheme We want to continue to invest in all our employees and do so by providing a £1000 yearly education budget that can be used on courses, conferences, books or training 25 days paid holiday + bank holidays to enjoy - you have the choice to carry over 5 days to the next year! Flexible working - we want to provide a hybrid model approach to working and provide you with 2 days a week working from home 20 days a year of global working - we provide the ability to work from anywhere in the world for up to 20 days a year We will provide you lunch everyday in the office - you don't need to worry about what to make or buy for lunch as we have it sorted with top quality food served by our in-house chef Alex! Please note: During your 3-month probation period, you will be required to work from the office 5 days a week. What happens next We aim to have a simple and speedy hiring process and we want to make sure that we are right for you as much as the other way around. CV application review - We will review it as quickly as possible Let's chat - Quick chat with our team about your experience and the role Technical Interview - Live Technical Interview + System Design Interview In Office Interview - Experience & Mindset + Lunch with other colleagues in the team + LT Chat

Who Are We? Smarkets is transforming the betting exchange space by delivering world-class technology and the best-priced markets in the industry. With over £29 billion in traded volume since 2010, we've built a product-led, transparent, and fair platform that challenges the norms of traditional betting. As a Series B tech company, we pride ourselves on engineering excellence, lean product thinking, and scientific rigor. With a close-knit team and a passion for innovation, Smarkets is where top talent comes to make a real impact. Now, we're looking for a DevOps Engineer to help scale our infrastructure and empower our developers with streamlined, self-service tooling and operational excellence. About the Role You'll join the DevOps Infrastructure Team, responsible for real-time distributed systems that power our trading engine-systems that are always-on, ultra-low latency, and demand resilience at scale. You won't just be building infrastructure-you'll be crafting platform capabilities to streamline how engineers build, test, deploy, and run applications across our hybrid estate of self-hosted, co-located hardware and AWS cloud. This is a role where infrastructure meets engineering productivity: part DevOps, part Platform, 100% mission-critical. What You'll Do Platform Enablement: Design and maintain internal tooling and workflows that improve the developer experience across deployment pipelines, observability and testing environments. Empower Developers (DevEx): Automate workflows, streamline CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab), and ensure fast, safe, and reliable deployments across environments. Infrastructure Automation: Build, manage, and scale Kubernetes-based microservices infrastructure on AWS using Terraform and Infrastructure-as-Code best practices. Developer Experience: Collaborate closely with product engineers to provide reliable, low-friction paths for development, testing, and deployment. Operational Excellence: Monitor, debug, and ensure the stability of our systems with robust alerting and logging using Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK. System Reliability: Optimize performance and availability for high-throughput, low-latency services that power the betting exchange. Collaborative Delivery: Participate in on-call rotations, incident reviews, and cross-functional projects with engineering and SRE teams. Security & Compliance: Contribute to secure system design and operational practices that support industry-standard compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc). What You Bring 2-4 years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering roles. Strong Linux systems administration background. Proficiency in Python and Bash scripting. Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS (or other public clouds). Familiarity with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and production-scale deployment. Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI) and a passion for improving the build/deploy process. A pragmatic mindset that balances ideal solutions with immediate business needs. Curiosity and initiative to explore new technologies and bring fresh thinking into the team. Bonus Points For Exposure to Nix-based Build environments. Understanding of self-hosted or hybrid infrastructure models. Experience with ArgoCD, Backstage or internal developer portals. Knowledge of Rust or C++ environments. Interest in performance engineering and low-latency systems. Our Stack Languages: Python, Bash, Rust, NodeJS Datastores: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Nix, Jenkins, GitLab CI Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Sentry Our Values Push to win Make others better Give a shit Be a pro Bring the energy Our values are at the heart of everything that we do. We believe these are the fundamentals to ensure we are delivering what's expected of us in the best way possible for ourselves and for those around us. Benefits We offer a competitive salary package and benefits, along with a dynamic and collaborative work environment. Your work with us will make an impact and your voice will be heard. We are a diverse team with a strong work ethic and plenty of hunger to win. We have designed our benefits offering around Health, Wealth, Lifestyle and Development. These include: Stock options which vests over 4 years Pension scheme - an impressive pension scheme via Aviva. We will match 6% if you choose the same Health insurance Fresh fruit and snacks provided in the office everyday! (tea, coffee and soft drinks also included) We're a member of a cycle to work scheme We want to continue to invest in all our employees and do so by providing a £1000 yearly education budget that can be used on courses, conferences, books or training 25 days paid holiday + bank holidays to enjoy - you have the choice to carry over 5 days to the next year! Flexible working - we want to provide a hybrid model approach to working and provide you with 2 days a week working from home 20 days a year of global working - we provide the ability to work from anywhere in the world for up to 20 days a year We will provide you lunch everyday in the office - you don't need to worry about what to make or buy for lunch as we have it sorted with top quality food served by our in-house chef Alex! What happens next We aim to have a simple and speedy hiring process and we want to make sure that we are right for you as much as the other way around. CV application review - We will review it as quickly as possible HackerRank Exercise - At home test to show off your skills Let's chat - Quick chat with our team about your experience and the role Technical Interview - Live Technical Interview + Experience and Mindset Chat In Office Interview - Lunch with other colleagues in the team + LT Chat