Lead Software Engineer

Director / Principal Engineer – Manchester

Manchester- on site

Salary: £130,000

We’re partnered with a global financial services organisation hiring a Director-level Principal Engineer to lead the build of a greenfield, mission-critical platform.

This is an excellent opportunity for a hands-on engineering leader who thrives in agile environments and enjoys solving complex business challenges through scalable, secure, and resilient technology solutions. You’ll play a key role in shaping engineering standards, leading talented teams, and delivering critical systems end-to-end.

This is a hands-on, individual contributor role with major influence-owning architecture, driving technical direction, and shaping a next-generation Corporate Actions engine from the ground up.

What you’ll do

• Own architecture and design for a large-scale, distributed platform
• Lead hands-on engineering of a greenfield system end-to-end
• Set engineering standards and influence technical direction
• Drive best practice across microservices, APIs, data, and DevOps
• Partner across global teams to deliver a critical enterprise platform

What you bring

• 15+ years engineering experience, operating at Principal level
• Deep Java (Spring Boot) expertise in microservices environments
• Strong architecture experience across scalable, distributed systems
• Experience with messaging (Kafka / MQ), data modelling, and APIs
• Solid DevOps: CI/CD, containers, cloud platforms
• Hands-on AI/ML experience and integrating AI into solutions
• Background in financial services (ideally Corporate Actions or post-trade)
• Ability to influence without authority in complex organisations

Tech stack

Java, Spring Boot, Angular, Kafka, Oracle, Docker, CI/CD tooling

A rare opportunity to build a critical platform from scratch while operating at the highest level of technical leadership-without people management.