Senior Backend Engineer (Investment Platform)

About the role

The Investment Platforms team bridges the gap between Investments and Technology, partnering closely with the Investment Directorate and Investment Operations teams to deliver technology change and operate platform systems that underpin our Investment Proposition. They manage a diverse and specialist technology landscape, including discrete applications, platform technologies, underlying data stores, market data solutions, and 3rd party managed services. The team works with the broader technology community to ensure Investment systems are scalable, secure, and aligned with business priorities, enabling innovation and operational excellence across the investment lifecycle.

As a Senior Backend Engineer (Investment Platform), you will play a key role in designing, building and enhancing the technology that underpins our Investment Platform. You'll lead the development, ongoing maintenance and operations of scalable, secure and resilient backend systems, data repositories and integrations, working closely with DevOps and Full Stack engineers to ensure backend services support the needs of our investment teams and wider business.

Working closely with architects, engineers and business stakeholders, you will provide technical leadership across the platform, defining engineering standards & best practices, automation and continuous improvement. You'll help shape the future direction of the platform, delivering innovative solutions that enhance investment operations, support data-driven decision-making and maintain the highest standards of performance, stability and compliance.

What you'll be doing

• Leading the technical design, development, and evolution of Investment Platform services, integrations, data platforms, and cloud-native solutions.
• Defining, promoting and enforcing engineering standards, best practices, and architectural principles across the Investment Platform.
• Providing technical leadership throughout the software development lifecycle, from solution design through deployment and operational support.
• Designing scalable, resilient, and secure backend services, APIs, and data pipelines capable of supporting business growth and increasing platform complexity.
• Acting as the technical lead for significant platform initiatives, ensuring successful delivery of complex cross-functional projects.
• Mentoring and coaching engineers, providing guidance on software design, quality engineering, cloud engineering, and platform architecture.
• Partnering with Platform and Enterprise Architects to define future-state architectures and technology roadmaps.
• Driving adoption of modern engineering practices including DevSecOps, Infrastructure as Code, observability, automated testing, and CI/CD.
• Leading investigation and resolution of critical production incidents, identifying root causes and implementing preventative improvements.
• Evaluating emerging technologies and provide recommendations on their adoption to improve platform capability, performance, scalability, and risk management.
• Ensuring platform solutions meet regulatory, security, governance, and operational resilience requirements.
• Acting as the senior technical SME for Investment Platform backend technologies across Technology, Data, Architecture, and Vendor Management teams.
• Influencing technical decision-making, balancing business priorities, technical debt, operational risk, and long-term platform sustainability.
• Championing automation, innovation, and continuous improvement initiatives, particularly through an SRE lens, across the Investment Technology estate.

About you

We're looking for a highly skilled Backend Engineer with a strong background in data engineering, integrations and backend cloud platform services. You'll be passionate about building scalable, resilient solutions and defining standards and procedures to solve complex technical challenges. You'll bring experience from an asset management environment, with the ability to work closely with both investment teams, platform engineers, and broader technology teams to deliver high-quality data and integration solutions.

Essential Criteria

• Strong experience designing, building and supporting scalable data and backend platform solutions using Python and SQL
• Experience working within Asset Management, Investment Management or a closely related Financial Services organisation, with an understanding of the data, operational and regulatory challenges that underpin investment platforms.
• Proven hands on experience owning Airflow and dbt end-to-end, including designing DAGs and dbt projects, setting standards, and running, upgrading and supporting them end to end.
• Proven experience delivering cloud native data and integration solutions on AWS.
• Strong understanding of data architecture, integration and ETL/ELT design patterns, with the ability to select and implement approaches appropriate to business, operational and technical requirements.
• Experience implementing modern software engineering practices, including Infrastructure as Code, automated testing and CI/CD pipelines.
• Demonstrable experience establishing engineering standards, providing technical leadership and mentoring engineers to improve engineering quality, consistency and delivery outcomes.
• Strong experience operating production platforms, including monitoring, observability, incident management and root cause analysis, with a focus on automation and continuous improvement.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear and actionable recommendations for business and investment stakeholders.

Desirable Criteria

• Experience working with investment data domains such as portfolio holdings, securities, pricing, benchmarks, transactions or market data, and an understanding of how this information is consumed across the investment lifecycle.
• Experience working with Snowflake and an appreciation of its capabilities as a modern cloud data platform.
• Experience integrating with third-party investment technology platforms and market data providers such as Bloomberg, FactSet, Aladdin or similar vendor ecosystems.
• Experience contributing to platform architecture roadmaps, engineering governance or long-term technology strategy within a large-scale enterprise environment.
• Familiarity with Linux-based development environments and the tools commonly used to support modern cloud engineering practices.
• Knowledge of Domain-Driven Design, software design patterns and architectural principles that support the development of maintainable and scalable platforms.