Jakub Kijak
Senior Software Engineer
London
Experienced backend engineer with a lot of focus on delivery and quality. Involved in managing various stages of software development, from business requirements gathering, planning and development, to deployment and support. Recognised for being vocal in design sessions and bringing a fresh perspective to the problem.
Experience
BlackRock, London
Vice President, Senior Engineer II
2023 – PresentJava 17, Spring, Batch, Kafka, Ignite, Zookeeper, gRPC, Azure, Cucumber, JMeter
- Developed an auto-invest feature with fully integrated pre/post-trade risk management for the Cachematrix 2.0, a trading liquidity platform designed to simplify cash management.
- Scaled and expanded the orchestration backend trading system with different order types and trading flows.
- Notable contributions were on the design, planning and development. Where as a tech lead, collaborated with our stakeholders on requirements and provided appropriate estimates.
- Delivered to 10+ client organisations, enabling risk and automating trading for 100+ users with plans to extend the offering to even more.
- Leading a squad of 6-8 engineers, responsible for distribution, review of the features, and additionally holding the team accountable for automated Cucumber integration testing and performance benchmarking.
- Pathing the way for the team to onboard our services to new gRPC standard, by coordinating all the engineers.
- An SME and contributor to BlackRock internal libraries, required reviewer for some, making sure to keep the company up-to-date and secure.
BlackRock, London
Analyst/Associate, Engineer
2017 – 2022Java 8, Spring, Kafka, Ignite, Consul, Angular, Grafana
- As a key developer in Cachematrix 2.0, designed and implemented from scratch a Kafka event based Java orchestration system for order management, allowing 75,000 users from 500 organisations, to login to the trading platform and create 2000+ daily orders.
- Worked closely with the platform team to solve cross-datacenter Kafka replication issues and authentication difficulties.
- Expanded on that design and delivered bulk order upload UI feature to 10,000 users across 100 clients, voted by clients as the most impactful feature in 2021.
- Pioneered a trading schedule caching service using Ignite for another BlackRock MyOrders management platform, service currently handles schedule data for over 20,000 funds and banks.
- It was the success of MyOrders that led to the launch of aforementioned Cachematrix 2.0 app.
- Previously completed a 2 year graduate program, rotating through 4 teams gathering insight into the full lifecycle of a trade, from portfolio management to trading to market execution.
BlackRock, London
Summer Internship, Intern
2016Java 7, AngularJS/4, Hadoop, Swing, Sybase
- Worked in the cash processing team. Enhanced a simulator used for TA order execution which was used for execution systems testing by over 100 users
- After which, migrated it from a Java Swing app to Angular 4 front end and Java 7 backend.
Education
- University of Manchester — M.Eng (Hons) Computer Science, First Class Degree (2013 – 2017)
- Moulton School and Science College — A levels: Maths(A), ICT(B), Polish(B), Physics(C) (2011 – 2013)
Languages and Frameworks
Storage
Cassandra, SQL/Sybase, Hibernate, JDBC
Monitoring/Performance
Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, JMeter
Awards & Certifications
- 2021 — BlackRock Best Innovation Award (Cachematrix 2.0)
- 2018 — OCA/OCP Java Certification
- 2013 — Hard work, academic excellence and special contributions to the school community and beyond award
- 2011 — 1st Place - Regional UK Schools Memory Championship