Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform

PowerToFly; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology company is seeking an experienced Staff Software Engineer to lead technical initiatives within their Regulatory Reporting team. The role involves owning complex backend systems and ensuring regulatory compliance through strong architecture and engineering practices. Ideal candidates will have experience in fintech or banking, expert skills in Java or Python, and a solid understanding of AWS. This hybrid role offers opportunities for professional growth and impact in regulatory systems.

Qualifications

• Proven operation at Staff Engineer level in complex environments.
• Background in regulated industries such as fintech or banking.
• Experience building mission-critical production systems.

Responsibilities

• Act as a technical authority for the regulatory reporting platform.
• Design and implement production-grade backend services.
• Lead architecture and design reviews.

Skills

Expert-level backend engineering skills in Java or Python

Strong system design skills

Operational mindset

Tools

AWS

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced Staff Software Engineer to play a critical technical leadership role within our Regulatory Reporting team. This role is responsible for designing, building, and operating highly reliable, auditable, and deterministic systems that support regulatory reporting across multiple jurisdictions.

As a Staff Engineer, you will be a hands‑on technical leader, shaping architecture and standards across backend services and data‑intensive workflows, while partnering closely with the Engineering Manager, Compliance, and Data Engineering teams to ensure regulatory obligations are met with precision and confidence.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Ownership & Architecture

• Act as a technical authority for the regulatory reporting platform
• Lead the design of backend services and data‑intensive systems supporting regulatory submissions, report generation and validation, evidence, traceability, and audit workflows
• Drive architectural decisions that balance correctness, scalability, and operational reliability
• Ensure systems are deterministic, reproducible, and versioned to support audits and restatements

Software Engineering

• Design and implement production‑grade backend services using modern engineering practices
• Apply distributed systems principles including idempotency and safe retries, failure isolation and graceful degradation, schema and API versioning
• Build systems with clear SLAs, SLOs, and observability
• Maintain a strong security posture across services and data access

Data‑Intensive & Reporting Systems

• Work closely with data engineering teams on canonical data models, regime‑specific reporting overlays
• Design software that integrates cleanly with analytical platforms and reporting datasets
• Backfills and historical restatements
• Late arriving data and reconciliation logic
• Full lineage from source systems to reported figures

Governance, Controls & Auditability

• Support regulatory audits, investigations, and remediation efforts
• Champion strong practices around access control, PII handling, and segregation of duties

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Lead and participate in architecture and design reviews
• Mentor senior and mid‑level engineers, raise the technical bar across the team
• Influence engineering standards without direct line management
• Partner closely with the Engineering Manager on technical strategy and execution

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

Qualifications

Experience

• Proven operation at Staff Engineer (or equivalent) level in complex environments
• Experience building and owning mission‑critical production systems
• Background in regulated industries such as fintech, payments, banking, or financial services
• Proven hands‑on experience in AWS

Software Engineering Expertise

• Expert‑level backend engineering skills in one or more of Java, Python (or similar)
• Strong system design skills across API‑driven architectures, data‑intensive services, batch and event‑driven workflows
• Deep understanding of reliability, observability, and operational excellence

Data & Analytics Awareness

• Strong understanding of data modelling concepts such as canonical models and dimensional models
• Experience working alongside modern data platforms (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift)
• Ability to reason about data lineage and traceability, reconciliation and variance analysis, backfills and historical corrections

Platform & Operations

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) such as Terraform
• Strong operational mindset
• On‑call participation
• Experience with incident response
• Experience with postmortems and continuous improvement

Nice to haves

• Prior experience building regulatory or statutory reporting platforms
• Exposure to near‑real‑time or API‑based regulatory submissions
• Background in payments, settlement, treasury, or ledger systems
• Hands‑on experience with Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar LLM‑based engineering tools
• Experience designing AI‑assisted developer workflows that improve productivity without compromising correctness or compliance

Additional Information

Visa is an EEO Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.