Staff Engineer - Brokerage Services

ig; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

IG Group is seeking a Staff Engineer to advance AI across Brokerage Services engineering. This hands-on role involves designing and building tooling that connects AI capabilities with Jira, GitLab, and the CI/CD pipeline, while maintaining high standards of code quality and production readiness.

You will mentor engineers, drive test-driven development, and own systems end-to-end in a mature Java backend environment.

Qualifications

• Senior or staff engineer with hands-on backend design ownership.
• Strong practice in test-driven development and pair programming.
• Ability to own systems end-to-end from design to production.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain internal tooling that embeds AI into engineering workflows.
• Build observability into the AI-enabled pipeline and monitor its effectiveness.
• Automate repetitive steps and deliver small releasable features continuously.
• Collaborate with product and security/compliance teams to ensure safe AI adoption and data handling.

Skills

Backend design

Test-driven development

Pair programming

AI tooling experience

Code reviews

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Job description

Job Title

Staff Engineer - Brokerage Services

Job Description

So, who are we?

IG Group is a FTSE 100 fintech operating across five continents, serving over 1.4m customers and handling billions of dollars in transactions - built on scale, trust, and proof. We didn't pivot to innovation; it's how we've always operated. What that means for the people who work here is real: genuinely complex problems to solve, the technology and resources to tackle them properly, and the kind of scope that's rare in established businesses.

The bar is high - bring a curious and forward-thinking mindset and we'll give you the platform to define what comes next.

Join us at IG - the future gets built here.

Your team

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to push hard on AI across Brokerage Services engineering: AI-assisted coding, testing and deployments, defect triage and observability, and the internal tooling that connects our AI tools safely to Jira, GitLab, and our CI/CD pipeline. This is a hands-on, cross-team role. You'll build tooling yourself, and you'll raise the bar for how aggressively every team in the group adopts it.

Your role in the Team's Success

This role suits experienced engineers with a deep grounding in software engineering practice: test-driven development, pair programming, and full ownership of systems from design through to production support, in a mature Java or a comparable backend service ecosystem at scale. You should be someone other engineers already come to for technical judgement. We want people who write their own tests, review their own designs, and catch their own defects, and who use AI to extend that excellent practice further and faster.

Our ambition: engineering that runs itself

The long-term goal is a pipeline where AI agents handle the bulk of coding support, testing, and triage end-to-team, largely unattended, with engineers stepping in for genuine judgement calls and exceptions. We're early on that path today, and we want someone in this role who treats the destination as real and pushes the group toward it deliberately.

What you'll do

Design, build, and maintain internal tooling that embeds AI into day-to-day engineering work: coding assistants, AI-assisted test generation, deployments, and defect triage.

Build observability into the AI-assisted pipeline itself, so every stage shows what the tooling is doing, catching, and missing.

Identify the manual steps in coding, testing, and release that can run largely unattended, and build the automation to get there.

Split work into small, releasable pieces that ship continuously.

Work closely with a product person on one of our product domains, so what you build is grounded in real delivery.

Treat improving ways of working and driving AI adoption as a fundamental, ongoing part of delivering value.

Partner with the test and PM function to bring AI into the testing pipeline: exploratory test generation, defect clustering, flaky-test detection, and smarter prioritisation of what to test.

Evaluate, pilot, and roll out LLM-based developer tools, for example Claude Code and similar, integrating them safely with our Jira, Confluence, and GitLab environments.

Set standards for responsible AI use in the SDLC: data handling, prompt hygiene, and guardrails around production and customer data.

Mentor engineers across Brokerage Services on effective use of AI tooling, and act as the go-to technical authority on AI-assisted engineering practice.

Work with security and compliance to make sure AI tooling meets IG's regulatory and data-handling requirements.

Define and track the metrics that show whether AI tooling is helping: cycle time, defect escape rate, test coverage, delivery turnaround. Iterate based on what the data shows.

What you'll need for this role

Significant experience as a senior or staff-level engineer, with a track record other engineers can vouch for.

Deep, hands-on expertise across our backend service ecosystem, at the level of designing and owning shared service architecture.

Deep fluency in test-driven development and pair programming as working disciplines.

Full-lifecycle ownership: you've designed systems, built them, deployed them, and carried the pager for them in production.

A genuine appetite for aggressive automation. You are energised by removing manual steps entirely.

Experience evaluating or building with LLM-based developer tools in a real engineering environment.

Preferred

• Experience with MCP, agentic tooling, or Spec Driven Development.
• Familiarity with the Atlassian ecosystem (Jira, Confluence) and its APIs.
• Prior experience in financial services, trading platforms, or another regulated, high-reliability environment.

The Perks

It really is more than a job. We think like a start-up, but we deliver like a FTSE 100 - so the bar is high, and we won't pretend otherwise. We work hybrid, which means three days in the office. We'll recognise your talent and make sure that you can still have a life - at work, and outside of it. N