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@damianhoward

Damian Howard

Senior / Staff Software Engineer in London with 20+ years of experience building trading, pricing, risk and post-trade systems for investment banks.

Front-Office Trading Platform

An end-to-end trading platform covering live market data, price-time-priority matching, Kafka execution flows, position booking and live risk.

▶ Explore the complete platform, submit orders, execute trades and watch positions, valuation, VaR and PnL update.

The platform is composed of five independently built and tested systems:

  • market-data retrieves real market quotes and retains the last-good snapshot through transient provider failures.
  • orderbook is a limit order book and matching engine with price-time priority, using scaled-integer prices and single-writer concurrency over an LMAX Disruptor ring buffer. Includes JMH throughput, latency and allocation benchmarks.
  • position-ledger is the book of record: it consumes executions from Kafka and books each one into a fill ledger and its position in a single Oracle transaction, so a replayed execution cannot double-count and a crash cannot persist one without the other.
  • risk-engine values options and computes Greeks, VaR and expected shortfall, independently cross-validated against OpenGamma Strata.
  • trading-desk is a single web entry point over the live order book and the trading screen it renders from the ledger.

The components are separately deployed and versioned. position-ledger and trading-desk compose the underlying services and libraries rather than duplicating their functionality.

Selected Experience

  • Morgan Stanley: trader-facing pricing, booking, P&L and risk systems for CDS Index Options and Structured Credit
  • Goldman Sachs: equities booking, high-volume trade processing and regulatory reporting across multiple engagements
  • Citi: front-office equities risk and P&L infrastructure, including distributed calculation orchestration, reconciliation and intraday/EOD processing
  • CMC Markets: low-latency options pricing and risk, FIX connectivity and off-heap market-data processing
  • Blockchain.com / AiX: institutional OTC trading, automated RFQ pricing and treasury infrastructure across spot, options, custody and lending
  • Credit Suisse: market risk and reference-data platforms, including large-scale in-memory risk aggregation

Other Engineering Work

  • portfolio-manager provides authenticated clients for Binance and Bitfinex, with venue-specific HMAC signing and a safety-focused withdrawal workflow.
  • stocks-analysis-us builds and ranks a US equity universe from public fundamentals and exports the results to Excel.

Engineering Approach

My work emphasises measurable performance, deterministic testing, explicit failure handling and clear architectural trade-offs.

The public repositories include CI, static analysis, coverage enforcement, concurrency stress testing, property-based testing, integration testing and independent correctness validation.

I also use agent-assisted engineering workflows for implementation, testing and review, while validating the resulting behaviour through benchmarks, automated tests and reference implementations.

Technology

  • Languages: Kotlin, Java, Scala, Python and TypeScript
  • Trading and integration: FIX, Kafka, REST and gRPC
  • Platforms: OpenShift, AWS, GCP and Docker
  • Domains: pricing, risk, trade lifecycle, post-trade, prime brokerage and treasury automation

For professional enquiries, please contact me through LinkedIn.

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  1. market-data market-data Public

    Real-time equity quotes from Yahoo Finance with a last-good cache, so a provider outage serves stale prices rather than none

    Kotlin

  2. orderbook orderbook Public

    Thread-safe Kotlin limit order book with time-priority-preserving modify; JMH-benchmarked on JDK 25 (~16 ns best-bid lookups, sub-microsecond add/modify)

    Kotlin

  3. risk-engine risk-engine Public

    Risk framework: option pricing, Greeks, and validated invariants

    Kotlin

  4. trading-desk trading-desk Public

    Reverse-proxy gateway unifying the order book and trading system as tabs in one live shell

    Kotlin

  5. position-ledger position-ledger Public

    Positions, risk and PnL over the orderbook fill stream — Kafka consumer, Oracle ADB persistence, risk-engine repricing, live dashboard

    Kotlin

Repositories

Showing 10 of 15 repositories

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