Senior Research Engineer

At Kpler, we are dedicated to helping our clients navigate complex markets with ease. By simplifying global trade information and providing valuable insights, we empower organisations to make informed decisions in commodities, energy, and maritime sectors.

Since our founding in 2014, we have focused on delivering top-tier intelligence through user-friendly platforms. Our team of over 500 experts from 35+ countries works tirelessly to transform intricate data into actionable strategies, ensuring our clients stay ahead in a dynamic market landscape. Join us to leverage cutting-edge innovation for impactful results and experience unparalleled support on your journey to success.

Maritime domain awareness and commodity tracking involve the effective fusion of fragmented information that compose the complex commodity flows landscape. When combined efficiently, vessel tracking data and trading history, commodity supply and demand, proprietary trading data, and machine learning algorithms provide an understanding of events at ports and on open seas at different levels of granularity.

Rapidly evolving global geopolitical developments and tensions significantly affect trading, disturbing the supply chain and altering commodity flow patterns which brings more uncertainty about the modelling of these phenomena.

As a Senior Research Engineer with Kpler’s Research Labs team, you will develop technologies that extend the state-of-the-art in the maritime, commodities and power domains and transfer research prototypes to production

Some of the exciting projects you will work on include:

• Driving the design, rapid experimentation, development, testing and deployment of software solutions for maritime event detection and data fusion;
• Optimising implementations to run in near real-time steaming mode and overseeing the continuous monitoring of deployed services;
• Extracting insights, patterns, and statistics from historical maritime data to be used in streaming services and to be distributed to other teams in the company;

As a senior research engineer, you will:

• Devise efficient solutions to tackle concurrent & distributed programming challenges while working with spatial / GIS data using relevant, up-to-date methods and technologies.
• Work across the stack to deliver new features end-to-end, from prototyping, to deployment and monitoring services in production.
• Ensure optimal, cost-effective design decisions that improve performance and overcome scalability limits.
• Own meaningful parts of our service, demonstrating the ability to lead projects independently, have an impact, and grow with the company.
• Identify opportunities for novel projects and liaise with product teams to advance ideas into value-adding features.
• Actively share knowledge and document insights, effectively communicate complex concepts and analysis to technical and non-technical audiences, aiming to support continuous team improvement and drive collaboration.
• Act as a mentor for our junior software engineers, helping to accelerate their growth; you will act as the Tech Lead on some projects.

Our software stack includes:

• Scala, Python, Big Data frameworks (Pekko / Akka, Spark, Flink), geospatial libraries (JTS, H3, GeographicLib, etc.), JSON libraries (Jackson), data science libraries (TensorFlow, LightGBM).
• AWS, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis

Mandatory requirements:

• You have at least 5 years of experience in a software engineer role, deploying solutions into production;
• You have proven experience delivering end-to-end software solutions that produce business value.
• You are proficient in Scala (or Java and willing to switch to Scala).
• You have expert knowledge of at least one cloud computing platform (preferably AWS).
• You are fluent in English.
• You have expertise in distributed architectures

Nice to haves but not mandatory:

• You have expertise on applications focusing on geospatial data and mobility analytics (highly desirable).
• You have proven experience with big data technologies, specifically Spark and Kafka.
• You have a Ph. D. in a quantitative field (computer science, mathematics, physics, engineering...).
• You are familiar with the shipping industry and commodity trading.
• You are comfortable with software engineering best practices.
• You value code simplicity, performance and attention to detail.
• You have experience working in an international environment.