Most recruitment firms know the job title. We know the market.
Illustrative Pipeline
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Illustrative pipeline · This is an example of a hiring funnel.
Specialist recruitment for capital markets technology
companies. We place the technology, product, data and
commercial talent that powers them.
One ecosystem. Three areas of focus.
Three streams sit at the centre of what we do.
The platforms and systems behind trading and investment decisions.
The rails the whole market depends on.
The technology behind post-trade, risk, surveillance and regulatory workflows.
Serving banks, asset managers, hedge funds, venues and the vendors who build for them.
The technology changes with the asset class. So does the talent. We know the workflows on both sides of the market.
Rates and credit e-trading, RFQ workflows, bond pricing and evaluated data, clearing and collateral.
Electronic trading, pricing, liquidity and distribution.
Trading and risk platforms for physical and financial markets.
Execution, order management, market structure, venues and the data around them.
Listed and OTC trading, risk, clearing and margin.
Trading, custody and the market infrastructure behind them.
Fund, deal and portfolio technology, and the firms that build it.
Direct lending and private debt platforms, from origination to servicing.
Investors and the high-growth financial technology companies they back.
Every capital markets technology company needs four things.
We recruit across all four.
The people who build the systems and keep them up when milliseconds cost money.
The people who turn the technology into something clients actually buy and use.
The people who win the clients, and keep them.
The people who make the business work.
From individual contributors through to Heads of department and the C-suite, across all four.
On paper, the brief was three quant engineers,two C++, one Python, for a London team under delivery pressure. The reality was a SaaS vendor trying to hire C++20 talent the hedge funds were paying 50 to 100 per cent bonuses to hold onto. The previous firm had burned a month submitting over-budget, off-target candidates. I reframed the opportunity around modern systems engineering rather than the alpha chase, mapped 241 engineers down to a shortlist of 15, and delivered three accepted offers, under budget, in six weeks.
Richard was instrumental in helping us fill several highly specialised quantitative roles. He brought strong candidates to the table, understood our technical and cultural requirements, and worked closely with me and the internal team to align the process. What stood out the most was his understanding of hiring engineers; he was very forthright with his insights on each person and didn’t oversell or undersell anyone he represented.Head of Quantitative Modelling + Global Trading Technology Vendor
This report is built from real hiring projects, candidate conversations, and salary discussions across the market data industry. Designed for everyone in the ecosystem, it provides a practical view of compensation, talent availability, and recruitment trends I am seeing in today's market.
| Role | Mid (GBP) | Senior (GBP) | Lead / Principal (GBP) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Java / C++ / low-latency engineer | £75,000 – £100,000 | £100,000 – £140,000 | £140,000 – £170,000 |
| Quant developer | £85,000 – £115,000 | £115,000 – £150,000 | £150,000 – £200,000 |
| Javascript / full-stack engineer | £60,000 – £85,000 | £85,000 – £115,000 | £110,000 – £145,000 |
| SRE / platform engineer | £65,000 – £80,000 | £90,000 – £115,000 | £115,000 – £150,000 |
| QA / Automation engineer | £40,000 – £55,000 | £50,000 – £85,000 | £65,000 – £100,000 |
Not every hiring challenge needs the same approach. Five ways we can work together.
Engagement model
For roles where the market is small and you need to know everyone in it.
I take retained work in markets I already know, so I can tell you who's who and where they sit. It gives me the time to go deep, and I run it on my 3RE method, like a proper agile project. I think all search should run this way.
engineers mapped to three accepted offers, under budget, in six weeks · global trading-tech vendor
Richard helped transform our hiring process, resulting in a 100% offer acceptance rate for roles we had previously struggled to fill.Chief People Officer, Capital Markets Financial Technology Firm
A small number of roles we are currently working on.
The senior HR leader for the London office of an international financial services group, sitting on the UK leadership team. Part of the job is the full HR toolkit: employee relations, organisational change and leadership development. The bigger part is making HR visible and trusted in the office again, and building the UK team around it.
A Deployment Engineer to own container deployment for every client of a vendor whose trading platform runs live, regulated venues. You'll turn each release into a repeatable OpenShift or Kubernetes deployment, prove it internally, then take it live with the client's own engineers. Nobody owns this yet, and you'll sit in design sessions before the code gets written.
Practitioner notes on the market. Real numbers, named patterns.
200 applicants, maybe one or two real hires. A full pipeline is not a talent pool. Why standard hiring fails in market infrastructure, and what works instead.
Read
'We need someone senior' kills more good hires than any bad candidate ever could. Most of the time it doesn't mean experienced. It doesn't mean exceptional. It means safe. What that costs you.
Read
Ghosting has taken over every recruitment conversation. The system is broken in places, that part isn't up for debate. But not every unanswered application is ghosting, and sometimes you didn't follow up.
ReadI built Ocean Red around one idea: know your market, know your clients and do what you said you were going to do.
Over 20 years in specialist recruitment, much of it across fixed income, trading technology, market data and growth-stage financial services businesses. The experience that changed how I recruit came from two years in-house at a Series A regulatory technology business, helping it grow from around 50 people to more than 100.
Sitting on the other side of the table teaches you quickly what good recruitment looks like, and how much time gets wasted when it isn't.
I didn't start Ocean Red to build a big agency and sell it. I started it to do recruitment properly, one search at a time. I'm involved in every search, and I won't put someone in front of a client unless I genuinely believe they're worth their time.
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