Associate Director, Software Engineering

We are currently seeking an experienced professional to join our team in the role of Associate Director, Software Engineering.

Principal responsibilities:

• Lead Technical Direction & Trading Architecture: Own the technical vision, architectural roadmap, and execution strategy for Core OMS, EMS and multi-couterparties connectivity, in close partnership with Product Owners, Market Operations, Risk, and Enterprise Architecture teams.
• Hands-on Technical Leadership: Lead by example through hands-on system design, low-latency coding, rigorous code reviews, different protocols integration, performance profiling, and troubleshooting complex production issues.
• Scalable & Resilient Trading Systems: Design and deliver high-throughput, fault-tolerant, and zero-loss microservices, event-driven messaging, caching layers, pre-trade risk controls, and automated reconciliation engines.
• AI & Agentic SDLC Transformation: Champion the adoption of AI-assisted engineering and agentic workflows across requirements decomposition, automated test generation (contract testing), code generation, automated code reviews, and release readiness.
• Engineering Standards & Guardrails: Establish best-in-class engineering standards covering automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployments, observability (Geneos, AppDynamics, Splunk), and automated pre-trade risk/compliance guardrails.
• End-to-End Delivery Ownership: Drive execution from concept to production rollout, managing technical debt, architectural runway, dependencies, and regulatory commitments across multi-region deployments.
• People & Culture Development: Coach, mentor, and grow software engineers; cultivate an engineering culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, ownership, and innovation.

Knowledge & Experience/Qualifications:

• Deep Hands-on Engineering Expertise: Substantial experience designing, building, and operating high-volume, low-latency, mission-critical distributed systems using modern Java, Spring Boot or Python.
• Capital Markets & Trading Domain Knowledge: Proven understanding of order management lifecycles, Smart Order Routing, market data processing, pre-trade risk controls, and post-trade reconciliation.
• Proven Technical Leadership: Demonstrated track record of setting technical direction, leading complex multi-tier system deliveries, and guiding distributed engineering teams within global organisations.
• Distributed & Event-Driven Systems: Deep practical experience with event-driven architecture (Apache Kafka / JMS), caching strategies (Redis), relational databases (PostgreSQL / Oracle), resilient API designs (REST / gRPC), and distributed transaction management.
• AI-Enabled Engineering & Emerging Tech Practical experience leveraging AI-enabled development tools and agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, AWS Bedrock, LLM tooling, automated test generation) to measurably boost SDLC efficiency, quality, and velocity.
• Resilience, Concurrency & High Availability: Strong expertise in designing for fault tolerance, failover/contingency patterns, idempotency, rate-limiting, circuit breaking, and sub-millisecond/low-latency optimisation.
• Stakeholder Influence & Communication: Ability to translate complex business and regulatory requirements into incremental technical milestones and articulate technical trade-offs to senior business and technology stakeholders.
• Communication: Excellent written and spoken English.