Lead Software Engineer

About Us   MarketAxess is on a journey to digitally transform one of the world’s largest financial markets, enabling the shift from analog, phone-based trading to a fully electronic marketplace. Why does this matter? Because our platform makes trading fixed-income more accessible, ultimately improving transparency, efficiency, and competition in the marketplace. Changing the way an established industry transacts is no easy feat. There will be twists and turns, because no one’s ever done this before. But now, more than 2,000 clients around the world rely on our solutions, and that number is only expected to grow in the years ahead. We know where we’re going. How we get there is up to us. Join us and help Take Us There.   The Role We are seeking a hands-on Lead Engineer to join our team who has a passion and expertise in helping us build our next-gen Trading Workstation.  The ideal candidate is someone who has demonstrated experience in building and operating highly scalable, available, and fault-tolerant Trading platforms across a range of technologies. You should be passionate about technology, architecture, software engineering and quality, and innovatively addressing business problems. You will work with the team to collaborate on software solutions and architecture and ensure exceptional software engineering practices, and good documentation.   It’s essential to be willing to take on new skills to meet the shifting demands of accelerating our modernization efforts to the public cloud and Kubernetes world. Feedback from your users should be something that you look forward to, as you will work closely with the Product and Engineering to incorporate their needs into the team’s roadmap and use it as a measure of success. A critical success factor is being viewed as a trusted partner and collaborator, including business and technology stakeholders.  We embrace a culture of collaboration and experimentation while striving and encouraging all team members to focus on continuous improvement and learning. We openly welcome diverse perspectives and people who are not afraid to challenge assumptions and prior ways of working.  Otherwise, how do we innovate, learn and grow as a team and individuals?    How You'll Help Take Us There You will demonstrate competencies across five key dimensions:  Interpreting business needs and setting strategy - Provide technical vision, drive strategy around solutions, solve complex problems, and act as the technical owner across strategic efforts for which your team(s) are responsible.  Project Execution and Applying Technology - Own the services your team delivers – from requirements gathering, design, development, testing, to production – and support the platform, while establishing repeatable processes and methods that ensure high productivity, quality, and reliability.  Providing Architecture Guidance - Define the principles, guidelines, standards, and solution patterns to ensure solution decisions are aligned with the firms target-state architecture vision. Create deliverables like standard definitions, reference models and architecture designs to support architectural governance to assess the impact of new and ongoing technology investment.  Team Leadership - Lead a team of engineers in identifying and implementing well-architected, cloud-native solutions that deliver the best possible experience for our clients and engineering teams. Mentor software engineers on the team, and through code reviews, ensure that all work meets team and industry standards.  Assessing Technology - Facilitates the evaluation and selection of software product standards and services, as well as understanding emerging technology trends and disruptions and their practical application to enable new and evolving business capabilities.  What You Bring to the Table   10+ years of experience of progressive software engineering experience, with 5+ in cloud computing environment (e.g., applications, infrastructure, storage, data, and platforms)  Adept at building and designing events driven architecture with Java and Kafka (KStreams) 3+ years of streaming and event processing architectures and platforms (e.g., Kafka)   Ability to plan, estimate, and manage the technical aspects of project execution and delivery  Have a product mindset that is deeply empathetic to customer needs, strategic in orientation, and metrics and outcomes-driven  Ability to leverage GenAI tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot or equivalent) to accelerate development and improve code quality. Applying AI-driven practices such as prompt engineering and AI-assisted code reviews to boost productivity and reduce delivery time while mitigating risks. Comfortable with ambiguity and adapting to changing requirements, with a proactive bias towards action  Good understanding of product management, agile principles and development methodologies and capability of supporting agile teams by providing advice and guidance on opportunities, impact, and risks, taking account of technical and architectural debt.  Comfortable delivering presentations to senior-level executives and technical audiences.  Minimum of 3 years of people management experience leading global teams.       E-trading and financial services industry, FIX Protocol experience is a plus.  What We’re Looking for   A proponent of strong collaborative software engineering techniques and methods: agile development, continuous integration, code review or pairing, unit testing, refactoring and related approaches.   Ability to articulate and document architectural decisions and roadmaps at a senior executive level.  Demonstrated ability to understand the long-term ("big picture") and short-term perspectives of situations.  Proven ability to build and maintain effective, trusting partnerships with product managers, architects and technical leads for individual products and applications.  Ability to propose and estimat