Description

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Apache Cassandra Database Engineer to join our Business Platform team supporting critical Financial Crime and Payments systems. You will play a key role in designing, building, and operationalising a high-performance Apache Cassandra platform that underpins a real-time payment capture and replay solution for fraud detection.

This role requires deep technical expertise in Apache Cassandra, NoSQL data modelling, performance optimisation, and production support within a highly regulated financial services environment. You will work closely with application, infrastructure, middleware, and security teams to deliver a resilient, scalable, and secure data platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement Apache Cassandra clusters, keyspaces, replication strategies, and partitioning models.
• Develop scalable Cassandra data models aligned with application query patterns.
• Optimise read/write performance through appropriate consistency levels, compaction strategies, and JVM tuning.
• Design highly available, fault-tolerant Cassandra cluster architectures.
• Perform cluster administration including node additions, decommissioning, repairs, backups, upgrades, and disaster recovery.
• Monitor database health and performance using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, DataStax OpsCenter, or equivalent.
• Support application teams with CQL query optimisation and Cassandra best practices.
• Collaborate with Actimize, IBM MQ/IIB, middleware, infrastructure, and security teams to ensure seamless platform integration.
• Implement database security including encryption at rest, encryption in transit, authentication, and RBAC.
• Produce technical documentation including solution designs, operational runbooks, support procedures, and knowledge transfer documentation.
• Deliver solutions in line with enterprise governance, regulatory standards, and change management processes.

Required Skills & Experience

• 4–9 years of hands-on experience administering and engineering Apache Cassandra in production environments.
• Strong expertise in Cassandra architecture, keyspace design, replication strategies, partition key design, and data modelling.
• Excellent understanding of Cassandra internals including SSTables, Memtables, Commit Log, Gossip Protocol, Tombstones, and Compaction.
• Strong experience with CQL development and performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience managing Cassandra clusters including repairs, scaling, backups, disaster recovery, and capacity planning.
• Strong Linux administration skills.
• Scripting experience using Bash and/or Python.
• Experience with monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or DataStax OpsCenter.
• Good understanding of database security, encryption, authentication, and RBAC.
• Experience working within Agile delivery environments.

Desirable Skills

• Experience with NICE Actimize.
• IBM MQ, IBM Integration Bus (IIB), or Apache Kafka.
• Oracle PL/SQL.
• DataStax Enterprise.
• Cassandra/DataStax certifications.
• AWS Keyspaces or Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra.
• Previous experience in Banking, Financial Services, Payments, or Financial Crime platforms.

What You'll Be Working On

• Real-time payment transaction processing platform.
• Fraud detection and financial crime systems.
• High-volume NoSQL data platform.
• Performance-critical, highly available Cassandra infrastructure.
• Cross-functional collaboration with architecture, middleware, infrastructure, security, and application teams.

Ideal Candidate

You are a highly skilled Cassandra specialist who enjoys solving complex performance and scalability challenges. You have strong ownership, can work independently, and are comfortable designing enterprise-scale NoSQL solutions while collaborating across multiple technology teams in a regulated financial services environment

Key Skills

Education

Any Graduate