VICE PRESIDENT, LEAD SOFTWARE ENGINEER – EQUITY DERIVATIVES TECHNOLOGY

Vice President, Lead Software Engineer – Equity Derivatives Technology

We are seeking an experienced and highly technical Vice President, Lead Software Engineer to join the Equity Derivatives Technology function. This role is responsible for the design, development, and delivery of robust, scalable, and high-quality technology solutions that support critical equity derivatives business capabilities. The successful candidate will be a hands-on engineering leader with strong expertise in Java, Spring Boot, SQL, and Python 3, combined with a deep understanding of computer science fundamentals and modern software engineering practices.

Role Purpose

The purpose of this role is to provide senior technical leadership and hands-on engineering expertise for complex technology platforms within the Equity Derivatives domain. The role requires an individual who can translate business and technical requirements into resilient software solutions, contribute directly to engineering delivery, and guide teams on sound design, implementation, and operational practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end design, development, testing, implementation, and ongoing enhancement of enterprise-grade technology solutions for Equity Derivatives platforms.
• Act as a hands-on senior engineer, producing high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code using Java, Spring Boot, SQL, and Python 3.
• Take ownership of complex technical problems from initial analysis through solution design, implementation, deployment, and production support.
• Apply strong software engineering principles, design patterns, secure coding practices, automated testing, code review discipline, and continuous improvement methods.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, quantitative analysts, risk teams, operations, infrastructure teams, and other technology groups to deliver business-aligned solutions.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and design guidance to engineering teams while promoting high standards of engineering quality and accountability.
• Design, implement, and optimize relational database solutions, including data models, SQL queries, transaction handling, indexing strategies, and data access patterns.
• Apply strong knowledge of concurrency, multithreading, distributed systems, transaction management, and performance engineering to deliver reliable and scalable applications.
• Contribute to platform modernization, automation, service resilience, observability, operational stability, and engineering process improvement.
• Ensure technology solutions comply with relevant control, security, maintainability, supportability, and regulatory expectations.

Required Technical Skills

• Extensive hands-on experience in Java, including core Java, object-oriented programming, collections, generics, exception handling, concurrency, JVM concepts, and performance optimization.
• Strong professional experience developing production-grade applications and services using Spring Boot and the broader Spring ecosystem.
• Advanced SQL capability with strong understanding of relational databases, schema design, indexing, query optimization, transaction isolation, locking, and data integrity principles.
• Demonstrable experience with Python 3 for software development, scripting, automation, data processing, tooling, or platform engineering use cases.
• Sound knowledge of computer science fundamentals, including programming principles, data structures, algorithms, complexity analysis, and structured problem solving.
• Strong understanding of RDBMS concepts, ACID transactions, consistency models, concurrency control, and database-backed application architecture.
• Strong understanding of system design and engineering concepts, including APIs, microservices, distributed systems, scalability, resilience, caching, messaging, event-driven architecture, observability, and fault tolerance.
• Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex technical issues across application, database, infrastructure, integration, and production environments.
• Experience with source control, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, build tooling, release practices, and engineering governance.

Equity Derivatives and Financial Technology Experience (Nice to have)

Experience in capital markets technology is highly desirable, particularly in Equity Derivatives, front-office platforms, pricing, trade capture, trade lifecycle, and booking. The successful candidate should be able to understand complex business workflows, engage effectively with functional and technical stakeholders, and convert business requirements into robust technology solutions. Exposure to derivatives products, trading platforms, market data, valuation, risk calculations, or trade processing will be considered an advantage.

Leadership and Ownership Expectations

• Demonstrate senior-level ownership, accountability, sound judgement, and disciplined delivery in a complex technology environment.
• Provide technical direction, coaching, and mentoring to engineers while remaining actively involved in design and development.
• Influence architecture and engineering decisions through clear technical reasoning, effective communication, and balanced trade-off analysis.
• Build strong working relationships with senior stakeholders, business users, technology partners, and cross-functional teams.
• Champion engineering excellence, innovation, continuous learning, collaboration, and a high-performance delivery culture.
• Balance long-term platform strategy with pragmatic execution and timely delivery of business priorities.

Key Performance Indicators

• Successful delivery of high-quality technology solutions within agreed timelines, scope, and engineering standards.
• Improvement in application stability, reliability, performance, and production support outcomes for assigned Equity Derivatives platforms.
• Measurable reduction in recurring production issues through effective root cause analysis, remediation, automation, and preventive engineering practices.
• Consistent contribution of clean, maintainable, secure, and well-tested code across Java, Spring Boot, SQL, and Python 3 based solutions.
• Effectiveness of technical design decisions, including scalability, resilience, maintainability, observability, and alignment with long-term platform strategy.
• Quality and timeliness of code reviews, design reviews, technical documentation, and engineering governance deliverables.
• Demonstrated improvement in database performance, data integrity, transaction handling, and query efficiency where applicable.
• Positive stakeholder feedback from business users, technology partners, risk teams, operations, and engineering colleagues.
• Effectiveness in mentoring engineers, raising technical capability within the team, and promoting engineering best practices.
• Contribution to platform modernization, automation, CI/CD maturity, test coverage, operational readiness, and overall engineering productivity.
• Adherence to applicable security, control, compliance, regulatory, and change management standards.
• Ability to proactively identify technical risks, communicate issues clearly, and drive pragmatic resolution in a timely manner.

Success Measures

• Delivers meaningful technical outcomes within the first 6 to 12 months, including successful delivery of assigned platform enhancements, remediation items, or modernization initiatives.
• Builds credibility as a hands-on technical leader by contributing directly to code, design reviews, debugging, and production issue resolution.
• Demonstrates measurable improvement in platform stability, performance, maintainability, observability, or operational readiness.
• Establishes strong working relationships with business stakeholders, technology partners, support teams, and engineering peers across regions.
• Improves engineering practices through better test coverage, code quality, automation, CI/CD maturity, documentation, and technical governance.
• Shows strong ownership of complex problems and consistently drives issues to closure with clear communication and practical decision-making.
• Effectively mentors engineers and raises the overall technical depth, problem-solving capability, and delivery discipline of the team.
• Develops sufficient understanding of Equity Derivatives workflows, systems, and business priorities to make sound design and delivery decisions.

Preferred Experience and Qualifications

• Significant professional experience in software engineering, with a proven track record of delivering enterprise-scale applications.
• Prior experience in investment banking, capital markets, trading, risk, or financial services technology is strongly preferred.
• Experience leading technical delivery for complex platforms, systems, or cross-functional engineering initiatives.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical discipline.
• Experience with cloud platforms, containerization, DevOps tooling, messaging technologies, or high-performance computing would be advantageous.

This document is for internal use only.