Senior Data Engineer (Quant & Alternative Data) in Abu Dhabi

Senior Data Engineer (Quant & Alternative Data)

Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE (relocation support provided)

Compensation: £120,000–£300,000 total compensation (fully guaranteed, all-in)

The Role

We are building a centralised data engineering and research platform that supports quantitative research teams across multiple asset classes.

This is not an asset-class-specific role, and not a traditional downstream analytics, BI, or ML-only position.

The team focuses on large-scale alternative and unstructured data, working from first principles to define the data foundations, tooling, and experimentation standards used across the investment platform.

The work involves messy, evolving datasets, performance-sensitive pipelines, and open-ended technical problems. Much of the stack is built in-house and remains largely greenfield.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build data ingestion, validation, and transformation systems from scratch
• Own datasets end-to-end, from raw ingestion through validation and transformation to research-ready delivery and downstream consumers
• Work with financial and alternative datasets used in quantitative research, including structured and unstructured data, large-scale text sources, and other high-dimensional, noisy data where failure modes are not always known upfront
• Build frameworks and tooling to support experimentation
• Optimise systems for correctness, robustness, and performance

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• Investigate anomalies, inconsistencies, and data quality issues
• Work directly with quants, researchers, and data scientists in an iterative, research-driven environment

This Role Is a Good Fit If You

• Are strong in Python and SQL, and comfortable working close to raw data
• Have experience building and operating modern data pipelines with real ownership
• Have worked on research-, trading-, or decision-critical systems
• Are curious about modern data tooling (e.g. Polars, Julia, Rust, Lakehouse patterns), even if you haven’t used all of it yet
• Prefer hands-on technical ownership

Ideal Background

• Systematic funds, quantitative asset managers, HFTs, or trading firms
• FinTechs or financial data providers

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• Big Tech or adjacent industries where work maps structurally to quant data problems (e.g. large-scale recommender systems, NLP on unstructured data, anomaly detection, knowledge graphs)
• Smaller teams with broad ownership and responsibility

Compensation & Benefits

• Fully guaranteed, competitive compensation
• Education allowance for dependent children
• 30 working days of annual leave, plus public holidays
• Comprehensive healthcare for employee and family
• Business class relocation flights
• Joining and departure allowances

The role is on-site in Abu Dhabi. Short-term remote work during peak summer months is supported. The working model prioritises sustainability and focused technical work.

Send your CV and a brief summary to

dana@durlstonpartners.com