Software Engineering Team Lead - Platform Services

Job Location: London

Employment type: Full-time

Department: Technology

Targeted Start Date: Immediate

DRW is a diversified trading firm with over 3 decades of experience bringing sophisticated technology and exceptional people together to operate in markets around the world. We value autonomy and the ability to quickly pivot to capture opportunities, so we operate using our own capital and trading at our own risk. Headquartered in Chicago with offices throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, we trade a variety of asset classes including Fixed Income, ETFs, Equities, FX, Commodities and Energy across all major global markets. We have also leveraged our expertise and technology to expand into three non-traditional strategies: real estate, venture capital and cryptoassets. We operate with respect, curiosity and open minds. The people who thrive here share our belief that it’s not just what we do that matters–it’s how we do it. DRW is a place of high expectations, integrity, innovation and a willingness to challenge consensus.

UP (Unified Platform) consolidates data and technologies into a comprehensive solution, accelerating time to market. Optimizing decision-making and research, our platform simplifies implementing new ideas, enhancing our competitive edge. We work from high-level requirements where programmers are expected to gain an intimate understanding of the business. We strive for an environment where developers have the autonomy to pursue business solutions without arbitrary management constraints. We are a group of polyglots and technologists always seeking to find the right tool for each problem. Broadly, the development teams at DRW believe in rapid deployment and feedback, automated testing, and cohesive, transparent, lightly-coupled service architectures.

The Platform Services team is productizing services that simplify interactions between development teams and infrastructure. Their goal is to accelerate development teams by allowing them to focus on their value-added responsibilities without worrying about the complexities of platform integrations and infrastructure. A few examples are:

• Access Management: simplify a development team’s approach to IAM and provide a consistent experience for a user’s experience across DRW’s proprietary and third-party systems.
• Usage: insight on usage patterns across UP services.
• Database Tables: to database table as a service that accelerates data mapping and other use cases.

As a Software Engineer Team Lead of the Platform Services team, you will lead a team that owns critical components of DRW's software platform. This role encompasses people leadership, technical leadership, project ownership, and hands-on development and support activities.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and mentor a team of engineers with a variety of skill sets, fostering a culture of excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Use strong leadership skills in mentoring, coaching, feedback, development, negotiation, and conflict management to enhance team performance and help people have a great experience in their work life.
• Lean on product leadership experience to build platform services with vision and purpose.
• Engage in hands-on software development and support activities, including pair programming.
• Drive project ownership, including defining requirements, scheduling, resource allocation, and ensuring timely delivery of projects.
• Engage with other development teams to understand how they engage with platform services.
• Contribute to system and architecture design discussions, challenging ideas and actively participating in the new feature development.

Required Qualifications:

• 7+ years of server-side development using a major programming language like Java, Ruby, Python, Clojure, or C#.
• 3+ years of experience leading engineers in a technical environment, with a strong emphasis on mentoring, development, and team management.
• Familiarity with system and architecture design principles, especially in the context of distributed systems.

Desirable Qualifications:

• Experience with Platform as a Service (PaaS) and the transformation of those into a product.
• Familiarity with Identity Access Management (IAM).
• Ability to own projects, define requirements, and lead development and support initiatives.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, with the capacity to work on both software development and support tasks.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, capable of fostering collaboration and effective teamwork across global locations.