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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 Kotlin limit order book and matching engine using scaled-integer prices and single-writer concurrency over an LMAX Disruptor ring buffer. Includes JMH throughput, latency and allocation benchmarks.
  • trading-system consumes executions from Kafka, books positions in Oracle, reprices through the risk engine and publishes live position, VaR and PnL updates.
  • risk-engine implements Black-Scholes valuation and Greeks in Kotlin, independently cross-validated against OpenGamma Strata.
  • trading-desk is a single web entry point over the live order book and trading dashboard.

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

Selected Experience

  • Citi: building cross-asset front-office risk infrastructure, including risk orchestration, reconciliation and intraday/EOD processing
  • Morgan Stanley: front-office pricing and risk for CDS Index Options and Structured Credit
  • CMC Markets: low-latency options pricing and FIX connectivity using Chronicle Map off-heap storage
  • Blockchain.com: institutional prime brokerage and treasury automation across major cryptocurrency venues
  • Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse: equities booking, securities lending, market risk and reference-data platforms

Other Engineering Work

  • portfolio-manager provides authenticated Kotlin clients for Binance and Bitfinex, with venue-specific HMAC signing and a safety-focused withdrawal workflow.
  • stocks-analysis-us is a Spring Boot pipeline that builds and ranks a US equity universe from public fundamentals and exports the results to Excel.
  • kafka-streams-patterns demonstrates practical Kafka Streams aggregation, joining and state-management patterns.
  • sudoku-dancing-links implements and compares Knuth's Algorithm X/Dancing Links and conventional backtracking.

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. trading-system trading-system 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 14 repositories

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