Staff Engineer - Brokerage Services

IG Group; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work

Competitive salary

Flexible Benefits Package

Private medical cover for you and your

Life insurance

Gym memberships

25 Days holiday + birthday + volunteer

Holiday purchase option

Parental leave benefits

Job summary

IG Group in London is seeking a Staff Engineer to push AI across Brokerage Services, designing and maintaining internal tooling that embeds AI into coding, testing and deployment.

You will own end-to-end systems, advance observability, and mentor engineers while aligning with regulatory and data-handling standards. The role is hybrid with office days in London.

Qualifications

• Senior or staff-level engineer with ownership of systems from design to production.
• Deep backend experience in a large-scale service ecosystem.
• Fluent in test-driven development and pair programming.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain internal tooling that embeds AI into day-to-day engineering.
• Build observability for the AI-enabled pipeline and monitor outcomes.
• Automate manual steps in coding, testing and release to approach unattended operation.
• Collaborate with product and PM on AI adoption in delivery.
• Define metrics for AI tool impact and iterate on data-driven improvements.

Skills

Backend service design

Java

AI tooling

Test-driven development

Pair programming

Observability

Code review discipline

LLM-based tooling

Tools

Jira

Confluence

GitLab

Job description

Job TitleStaff Engineer - Brokerage ServicesJob DescriptionSo, 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 teamWe’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 SuccessThis 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 itselfThe long-term goal is a pipeline where AI agents handle the bulk of coding support, testing, and triage end-to-end, 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 doDesign, 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 roleSignificant 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.PreferredExperience 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 PerksIt 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. Networks, committees, awards, sports and social clubs, mentorships, volunteering opportunities, extra time off… the list goes on.Competitive salaryFlexible Benefits Package on top of your salary (12%)Private medical cover for you and your familyLife insuranceContribution to gym memberships25 Days holiday, with 1 additional day off to celebrate your Birthday & 2 additional days off a year for voluntary work (28 in total)The option to buy or sell holiday daysA comprehensive global and local onboarding processEnhanced primary (maternity), secondary (paternity), and shared parental pay and leave, as well as a range of support and benefits for parentsNumber of openings1