Scala Architect

Location

Greater London, England, United Kingdom

Overview

A major global investment bank is seeking a highly experienced Scala Architect to lead the technical architecture of its core Operations Technology platforms. You will work across multiple regulatory, post-trade, and control-focused change streams, helping to modernise and scale the bank’s back‑office ecosystem.

This role blends deep engineering expertise with architectural leadership, supporting business domains such as settlements, confirmations, trade lifecycle processing, reconciliations, regulatory reporting, and operational controls.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the Scala‑based architecture for core back‑office and post‑trade platforms.
• Work across multiple regulatory streams (e.g., EMIR Refit, MiFID II, SFTR, CFTC, Basel Ops impacts) ensuring systems meet compliance, transparency, and audit requirements.
• Lead the design of scalable, reliable systems that support high‑volume trade processing, matching, exception management, and workflow automation.
• Collaborate with global Operations, Compliance, Risk, and Technology teams to translate complex regulatory and operational processes into efficient system designs.
• Establish engineering best practices for functional programming, microservices, cloud adoption, resiliency engineering, and operational observability.
• Drive technical governance, platform strategy, and roadmap decisions for Operations Technology.
• Provide hands‑on guidance for distributed systems development using Akka, Kafka, Spark, and related technologies.
• Support delivery teams with architecture reviews, performance tuning, and integration patterns across upstream and downstream platforms.

Required Skills & Experience

• Expert‑level experience with Scala and functional programming principles.
• Strong background architecting large‑scale distributed systems in a back‑office or post‑trade context within financial services.
• Detailed knowledge of trade lifecycle events, settlements, confirmations, reconciliations, exceptions, and operational workflows.
• Understanding of regulatory reporting and operational controls (e.g., EMIR, MiFID II, SFTR, CFTC).
• Strong experience with event‑driven architectures (Kafka), streaming technologies, and microservices.
• Familiarity with control frameworks, auditability, data lineage, and operational risk requirements.
• Cloud experience (AWS/GCP/Azure) plus containerisation tooling (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Excellent communication and stakeholder‑facing skills, particularly with Operations, Regulatory Change, and Risk.

Nice to Have

• Knowledge of workflow engines (Camunda, Activiti, etc.) used in operational processes.
• Understanding of enterprise data models and reference data in a banking context.
• Experience with Java, Kotlin, or Python alongside Scala.
• Exposure to reconciliation engines, settlements platforms, or middle/back‑office vendor systems.

Seniority level

• Director

Employment type

• Contract

Job function

• Information Technology

Industries

• Investment Banking