Role at a Glance
Software Engineer at Cobblestone Energy's Dubai office, building high-throughput trading infrastructure for European energy markets. Requires 2–5 years of experience, preferably in Java or Python. Salary: $80,000–$120,000 per year plus performance bonus in a 0% income-tax jurisdiction. UAE residency visa and international relocation both sponsored by the company. Employee share scheme eligibility included.
What This Role Is Actually About
Cobblestone Energy is bringing on a software engineer to build and run the technology layer behind their European energy trading operation. You will sit close to the commercial side of the business — working alongside quantitative traders and infrastructure specialists — writing systems that handle live market data, route orders, and manage risk exposure in real time. The work has direct financial consequences, which means production reliability and low latency are treated as hard constraints, not nice-to-haves. If you want engineering work where what you ship visibly moves the business, this is that environment.
About Cobblestone Energy
Cobblestone Energy is a European energy trading firm founded in 2018, operating across Gas, Power, and Emissions markets. The company pairs quantitative analysis with proprietary technology to identify and act on profitable trading opportunities. Organisationally, it keeps a deliberately flat hierarchy — ideas win on merit, not on seniority. The culture values intellectual honesty, continuous learning, and individual ownership. The Dubai office serves as the hub for a globally recruited team, and the firm backs that commitment with direct visa sponsorship and relocation support rather than simply listing them as perks.
What You'll Be Building and Owning
- Design and develop high-throughput systems covering market data ingestion, order execution, and real-time risk management
- Partner directly with traders and quantitative analysts to translate strategy requirements into production-ready software
- Own system reliability end-to-end: automated test suites, CI/CD pipelines, and a thorough code-review culture
- Continuously profile and tune systems to hit latency and throughput targets in a live trading environment
- Diagnose and resolve production incidents rapidly and accurately under commercial time pressure
- Maintain engineering documentation that supports knowledge transfer and on-call operations across the team
- Research and evaluate emerging technologies for practical applicability to the trading platform
- Provide technical mentorship and structured code-review feedback to junior engineers
What You Need to Be Considered
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or an equivalent technical discipline
- 2–5 years of professional software development experience, with hands-on work in Java, Python, or both
- Demonstrated track record of shipping and sustaining production systems under real operational load
- Solid command of API design principles, database modelling (relational and non-relational), and distributed system architecture
- Strong programming fundamentals across data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and memory management
- Ability to lead technical design discussions and defend architectural trade-offs with clear reasoning
- Clear written and verbal communication skills; collaborative across engineering, trading, and infrastructure functions
- Self-motivated and resilient in a fast-moving, results-driven trading environment
Skills Breakdown: What's Firm vs. What Adds Value
Java and Python are the core stack — the role accepts either, but production-level fluency in at least one is a firm expectation. Beneath the language choice, the real bar is systems competence: API design, database architecture, and distributed systems reasoning at scale. The 2–5 year window combined with the expectation to mentor junior engineers signals a mid-level position where strong fundamentals and independent judgment matter more than framework breadth. Candidates with prior exposure to low-latency or high-throughput contexts — financial data pipelines, market feeds, or similar — will find the ramp-up faster, though the role does not list that as a stated hard requirement.
Compensation and Package Details
The advertised base salary range is $80,000 to $120,000 per year. Dubai levies no personal income tax, meaning the full base amount is take-home pay with no federal or local earnings deductions applied. On top of the base, the role includes a performance-based bonus tied to individual results and eligibility to join the employee share scheme, creating additional upside linked to company performance. Annual leave is set at 30 calendar days, supplemented by 8–14 UAE public holidays per year as declared by the government. Health cover is comprehensive private insurance spanning inpatient, outpatient, and dental care. End-of-service gratuity is provided as mandated under UAE Labour Law.
Full Benefits Package
- 30 calendar days of annual leave per year
- 8–14 UAE public holidays annually, as declared by the UAE Government
- Comprehensive private health insurance — inpatient, outpatient, and dental
- Performance-based annual bonus
- Employee share scheme participation
- UAE residency visa sponsorship provided by Cobblestone Energy
- International relocation assistance for candidates moving to Dubai
- End-of-service gratuity per UAE Labour Law
- Monday–Friday working week
Location, Visa, and Relocation
This is a fully on-site role based in Dubai, UAE — no remote or hybrid arrangement is mentioned in the listing. For international candidates, Cobblestone Energy sponsors the UAE residency visa directly and provides relocation support, removing the two most common financial barriers to taking a role abroad. The standard working week is Monday through Friday, with a probation period of 3–6 months as set out under UAE Labour Law.