Summary
✨ AI‑Generated
Be a key engineer shaping the core pricing infrastructure for a major international exchange. You will build robust, event‑driven Java services that power global reference pricing and volatility controls, working across the full lifecycle of each system and partnering with operations to ensure reliability and performance.
Highlights
Lead technical direction for a critical, business‑essential pricing platform in global financial markets, designing and delivering high‑impact, event‑driven Java services with full ownership from concept to production, while enjoying autonomy and close collaboration with operations.
Description
Principal Engineer (Java / Event-Driven) — Financial Markets, London
London / hybrid — 3 days per week in office
Please note: visa sponsorship is not available for this role
A major London exchange is rebuilding the systems behind its global reference pricing and cross-venue volatility controls, bringing a critical estate back in house after years of vendor dependence.
This is a genuine build programme, not maintenance, and we're looking for a Principal Engineer to help lead it.
The role
This is a senior individual contributor position (no people management).
You'll drive technical direction, architecture, and hands-on delivery of business-critical pricing platforms, systems that sit at the heart of the exchange and cannot fail.
You'll design, build, test, and own services end to end, embedding with operations and the business rather than working purely heads-down.
There's real autonomy here to make design decisions in your own space and drive projects from concept to delivery.
What you'll bring
Significant hands-on Java engineering, building and operating distributed systemsDeep experience with microservices, APIs and event-driven architecture (Kafka)Kubernetes and cloud-native delivery, with strong DevOps practice across CI/CD, IaC and automated testingThe judgement to lead design discussions, weigh trade-offs pragmatically, and make sound engineering decisionsA breadth-first mindset: strong systems thinking matters more here than narrow specialismThe maturity to work autonomously and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholdersExperience in financial services, trading or other regulated environments;
Nice to have
SRE practice; observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, OpenTelemetry, Elastic); active open-source contribution.
Why it's worth a look
Modern, open-source-friendly engineering culture with AI tooling being rolled out, meaningful ownership of critical infrastructure, and the chance to shape a greenfield in-housing programme from the front.
