Lead Backend Engineer, Investment Platform

St. James's Place; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus scheme

28 Days' annual leave

Private Medical Insurance

Employer pension contribution 10-15%

Parental leave enhancements

Critical illness cover & life support

EV salary sacrifice scheme

Job summary

St. James's Place seeks a senior engineering leader to design and evolve Investment Platform services, data platforms, and cloud-native solutions. You will set standards, drive DevSecOps, and mentor engineers across the software lifecycle.

You will partner with Platform and Enterprise Architects to shape future-state architectures, own critical backend services and data pipelines, and ensure regulatory and security compliance in a scalable investment technology environment.

Qualifications

• Strong experience designing, building, and supporting scalable data and backend platform solutions using Python and SQL.
• Experience in Asset Management, Investment Management, or a closely related Financial Services organisation, with an understanding of investment platform data, operational, and regulatory challenges
• Hands-on experience owning Airflow and dbt end-to-end, including designing DAGs and dbt projects, setting standards, and running, upgrading, and supporting them
• Experience delivering cloud-native data and integration solutions on AWS
• Strong understanding of data architecture, integration, and ETL/ELT design patterns, and selecting approaches for business, operational, and technical requirements
• Experience implementing Infrastructure as Code, automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience establishing engineering standards, providing technical leadership, and mentoring engineers to improve engineering quality, consistency, and delivery outcomes
• Experience operating production platforms, including monitoring, observability, incident management, and root cause analysis, with a focus on automation and continuous improvement
• Strong stakeholder management skills and ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable recommendations for business and investment stakeholders
• Будет плюсом: experience with investment data domains such as portfolio holdings, securities, pricing, benchmarks, transactions, or market data; Snowflake; integrations with third-party investment technology platforms and market data providers such as Bloomberg, FactSet, or Aladdin; contributing to platform architecture roadmaps, engineering governance, or long-term technology strategy in a large-scale enterprise; familiarity with Linux-based development environments and modern cloud engineering tools; knowledge of Domain-Driven Design, software design patterns, and architectural principles for maintainable, scalable platforms

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design, development, and evolution of Investment Platform services, integrations, data platforms, and cloud-native solutions.
• Define, promote, and enforce engineering standards, best practices, and architectural principles across the Investment Platform.
• Provide technical leadership throughout the software development lifecycle, from solution design through deployment and operational support.
• Design scalable, resilient, and secure backend services, APIs, and data pipelines.
• Lead significant platform initiatives and ensure delivery of complex cross-functional projects.
• Mentor and coach engineers on software design, quality engineering, cloud engineering, and platform architecture.
• Partner with Platform and Enterprise Architects to define future-state architectures and technology roadmaps.
• Drive adoption of DevSecOps, Infrastructure as Code, observability, automated testing, and CI/CD.
• Lead investigations and resolution of critical production incidents, identify root causes, and implement preventative improvements.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend adoption to improve platform capability, performance, scalability, and risk management.
• Ensure platform solutions meet regulatory, security, governance, and operational resilience requirements.
• Act as the senior technical SME for Investment Platform backend technologies across Technology, Data, Architecture, and Vendor Management teams.
• Influence technical decisions by balancing business priorities, technical debt, operational risk, and long-term platform sustainability.
• Champion automation, innovation, and continuous improvement across the Investment Technology estate, particularly through an SRE lens.

Skills

Python

SQL

Asset management domain

Airflow

dbt

AWS

DevSecOps

CI/CD

Mentoring

Data architecture

Tools

Airflow

dbt

AWS

Job description

St. James's Place seeks a senior engineering leader to design and evolve Investment Platform services, data platforms, and cloud-native solutions. You will set standards, drive DevSecOps, and mentor engineers across the software lifecycle.

You will partner with Platform and Enterprise Architects to shape future-state architectures, own critical backend services and data pipelines, and ensure regulatory and security compliance in a scalable investment technology environment.