Head of Data

About Keyrock

Since our beginnings in 2017, we've grown to be a leading change-maker in the digital asset space, renowned for our partnerships and innovation. Today, we rock with over 200 team members around the world. Our diverse team hails from 42 nationalities, with backgrounds ranging from DeFi natives to PhDs. Predominantly remote, we have hubs in London, Brussels, Singapore and Paris, and host regular online and offline hangouts to keep the crew tight.

We are trading on more than 80 exchanges, and working with a wide array of asset issuers. As a well-established market maker, our distinctive expertise led us to expand rapidly. Today, our services span market making, options trading, high-frequency trading, OTC, and DeFi trading desks as well as digital asset management. Keyrock is looking to expand and establish itself as a full-service financial institution through both organic innovation and inorganic growth.

But we’re more than a service provider. We’re an initiator. We're pioneers in adopting the Rust Development language for our algorithmic trading systems, and champions of its use in the industry. We support the growth of Web3 startups through our Accelerator Program. We upgrade ecosystems by injecting liquidity into promising DeFi, RWA, and NFT protocols. And we push the industry's progress with our research and governance initiatives.

At Keyrock, we're not just envisioning the future of digital assets. We're actively building it.

Mission Statement for the Head of Data

We are seeking a Head of Data to lead the strategic direction and operational excellence of the firm’s trading data ecosystem. This role will be pivotal in ensuring the quality, reliability, and scalability of data that underpins trading, quantitative research, risk management, and decision-support functions. The Head of Data will drive data excellence across the organisation by defining best practices, enhancing data reliability and performance, and enabling teams to derive meaningful insights and value from data. The successful candidate combines deep technical expertise in data engineering and ML workflows with a strategic mindset and a strong understanding of trading-related data models and compliance requirements.

Strategic Leadership

• Define and execute a data strategy focused on trading and market data, ensuring accuracy, timeliness, and integrity across the lifecycle.
• Collaborate with the Architecture Team to build a robust and compliant data architecture optimised for analytical workloads, operational systems, and regulatory obligations.
• Drive the organisation’s data excellence agenda, embedding reliability and observability across the data platform, while ensuring alignment with established governance standards.
• Prioritise initiatives that enhance trading visibility, risk transparency, and business performance through data.
• Identify opportunities where data and ML capabilities can enhance trading performance, risk assessment, and business efficiency.

Architecture & Platform Management

• Lead the implementation and evolution of cloud-native data platforms that support ingestion, transformation, and analytics of trading and financial datasets, in close collaboration with the Architecture Team.
• Standardise data ingestion and modelling patterns to ensure interoperability between systems.
• Collaborate closely with the Architecture Team to align data platform evolution with enterprise and application architecture principles.
• Ensure data systems meet performance, cost, and scalability targets across multiple environments.
• Drive the adoption of data engineering best practices that balance agility with operational excellence.

Governance, Quality & Compliance

• Enforce and maintain robust data governance across the full lifecycle, including data lineage, access control, and retention.
• Partner with Security and Compliance teams to ensure adherence to SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, DORA, and other relevant frameworks.
• Ensure consistent metadata, documentation, and versioning across the data stack.
• Champion a data-driven culture, ensuring transparency, traceability, and auditability of all data assets.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing Central Data Team (Data Engineering, Data Intelligence, Data Operation).
• Partner with Engineering, Architecture, Quant Research, Risk, and Finance to deliver unified, trusted, and scalable data solutions.
• Foster a culture of data reliability, accountability, and continuous improvement across teams.
• Define measurable data KPIs around latency, availability, and quality to continuously improve the data platform.
• Promote collaboration between data producers and consumers to streamline trading analytics, reporting, and automation.
• Champion a data-driven and experimentation-driven culture across the organisation.

Background And Experience

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or data platform leadership roles.
• Proven experience in building and managing trading or financial data platforms.
• Strong understanding of market data feeds, trade lifecycle, and financial data models.
• Expertise with modern data technologies (ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Kafka, or equivalents.).
• Experience implementing ML Ops frameworks (e.g. MLflow, Kubeflow, Prefect, or SageMaker).
• Deep understanding of ETL/ELT pipelines, streaming architectures, and data lifecycle management.
• Experience working in Kubernetes and cloud-native environments (AWS preferred).
• Sound knowledge of data governance, security, and compliance best practices.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence data-driven decision-making.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in crypto markets, financial trading, quantitative research environments or other data-intensive industries.
• Exposure to real-time analytics, monitoring, and observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, DataDog etc.).
• Understanding of DataOps, FinOps, and cost-optimised data management practices.
• Familiarity with distributed systems and high-throughput data processing (e.g. Ray, Dask, Spark).
• Experience with feature engineering, model lifecycle management, and data-driven research environments (e.g. JupyterHub).

Our Recruitment Philosophy

We value self-awareness and powerful communication skills in our recruitment process. We seek fiercely passionate people who understand themselves and their career goals. We're after those with the right skills and a conscious choice to join our field. The perfect fit? A crypto enthusiast who’s driven, collaborative, acts with ownership and delivers solid, scalable outcomes.

Our Offer

• Competitive compensation and flexible work arrangements.
• Autonomy in your time management thanks to flexible working hours and the opportunity to work remotely.
• A leadership role driving the firm’s trading data strategy and data excellence vision.
• A collaborative engineering culture with strong partnerships between Data, Architecture, Infrastructure and Platform teams.
• The opportunity to shape an enterprise-grade data foundation that powers trading, analytics, and strategic decision-making at scale.
• The freedom to create your own entrepreneurial experience by being part of a team of people in search of excellence.

As an employer we are committed to building a positive and collaborative work environment. We welcome employees of all backgrounds, and hire, reward and promote entirely based on merit and performance. Due to the nature of our business and external requirements, we perform background checks on all potential employees, passing which is a prerequisite to join Keyrock.

Key skills/competency

• Data Strategy
• Data Governance
• Data Architecture
• Data Engineering
• MLOps
• Trading Data
• Cloud-Native Platforms
• Financial Data Models
• Team Leadership
• Compliance (SOC 2, DORA)