Head of Engineering (Energy and Commodities)

The TP ICAP Group is a world leading provider of market infrastructure. Our purpose is to provide clients with access to global financial and commodities markets, improving price discovery, liquidity, and distribution of data, through responsible and innovative solutions. Through our people and technology, we connect clients to superior liquidity and data solutions. The Group operates from more than 60 offices in 27 countries. We are 5,300 people strong. We work as one to achieve our vision of being the world’s most trusted, innovative, liquidity and data solutions specialist.

Role Overview: The Energy and Commodities (E&C) division are seeking a highly experienced, self-motivated, and delivery-focused individual to become the Head of Engineering. The role will require managing multiple Agile Software Engineering teams against the E&C Value Stream within TP ICAP. The successful candidate will be a key contributor to the day-to-day operation of the engineering teams, ensuring that the overall delivery capability is utilised effectively and is aligned with E&C’s strategic goals. They will also play a pivotal role in the organisation’s transition to new ways of working and an engineering-focused culture.

As a direct report to the CIO of E&C, the senior engineer will ensure the technical delivery of the portfolio, providing governance pertaining to architecture, code quality, standards, tools and technology. A further important consideration must be given to continuous improvement and modernisation of the capabilities, resources and technologies. The E&C ecosystem is delivered through in-house and vendor-provided technologies hosted both on-premises and using AWS cloud infrastructure. Applications are implemented in a mixture of Microsoft .NET and Java backends, React front end and some thick-client implementations.

The successful individual will be passionate about software development and keen to use their technical and mentoring skills to build a successful development team, displaying urgency and drive coupled with a delivery culture which fosters transparent communication. Additionally, the candidate should have a commitment to quality, invest in a controlled fashion in innovation, and have a focus on getting things done / shipping on time.

Role Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage 4-5 teams across the E&C development function to deliver the overall portfolio of work with integration considerations for the wider estate.
• Act as the primary technical leader and developer on the team, demonstrating strong technical competencies and acting as a dependable and high value contributor within the team.
• Responsible for the estimation, design, development, testing and overseeing highly complex production software solutions.
• Accountable for the delivery of the applications to both internal and external users.
• Be a Servant Leader working with team Scrum Masters to unblock the teams and ensure delivery is unimpeded, and velocity is high.
• Facilitate Scrum of Scrums.
• Work with the local Regional Head of Engineering to evolve the delivery framework and identify opportunities to evolve systems towards target state architecture.
• Communicate to senior management and stakeholders articulating technical challenges, issues, opportunities/value from investing in technology.
• Communicate with the wider technology teams to coordinate interdependencies, resolve issues, and share knowledge.
• Communicate with governance streams to ensure adherence to and development of process, quality, architectural design, and engineering excellence.
• Work with recruitment teams and 3rd parties to ensure the Agile teams have a full complement of skills and are cross-functional.
• Proactively work with Production Management to improve production stability and take part in incident management to ensure Production defects are rectified based on their criticality and severity.
• Guide and support the team in identifying and escalating risks as appropriate.
• Identify tools and methodologies to improve the effectiveness of the development process.
• Ensure inter-project dependencies and projects risks are understood and managed.
• Guide and support the team in implementation and adherence to Change Control principles.

Experience / Competences Essential:

• Demonstrable experience line managing multiple software delivery teams / Lead of Leads.
• Demonstrable senior level and current experience of hands-on Full-Stack Software Engineering leadership with C#, Java, C++ JavaScript / TypeScript with React, and low latency event driven architectures.
• Experience of a general-purpose scripting language (such as Python, Perl, Ruby) and SQL.
• Experience of Application Lifecycle Management Tools and technologies such as Source Code Management; git, DevSecOps platforms; GitLab, TeamCity.
• Perform meta/code reviews.
• Experience of OO design principals such SOLID / DRY / YAGNI to create maintainable, self-documenting and high-quality code.
• Experience of Architectural Patterns and practices such as Backend for Frontend, Micro Frontends, Microservices, Cloud Patterns.
• Experience of and understanding of the importance of maintaining code quality using Unit/Integration/e2e testing, utilising Quality Assurance expertise to automate regression or perform manual testing if appropriate.
• Collaborate on Solution Technical Architecture with Enterprise Technical Architects to follow Enterprise standards.

Desired:

• Knowledge of the trading business domain – or equivalent Financial Markets experience.
• Knowledge of commodities markets.
• Knowledge or application of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).
• Experience of Domain Driven Design (DDD) and implementing patterns like CQRS to facilitate polyglot persistence.
• Experience of GraphQL and subscription-based streaming.
• Knowledge and use of Cloud Technologies and concepts preferably on AWS or Azure/GCP etc.
• Use of and working with Containerisation to aid deployability, testing and loose coupling.
• Actor frameworks like DAPR, AKKA, Orleans.
• Strong analytical ability and problem-solving skills.

Job Band & Level Function Head / Band 8