Falcon Smart IT (FalconSmartIT)
Senior Apache Cassandra Engineer
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Senior Apache Cassandra Engineer
Job Location: London, UK (Hybrid)
Job Type: Contract
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.
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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.
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Preferred Skills & Experience
- 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.
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