Principal Engineer, London Stock Exchange
AWS & Java
Office located in Chapel Quarter, Nottingham / Canada Square, London
Stock exchange in the City of London
Be an early applicant
Stock exchange in the City of London
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
Office located in Chapel Quarter, Nottingham / Canada Square, London
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make things happen, out there in the real world, where it matters.
Role
Who you are
- Extensive experience as a Principal Engineer, or equivalent senior technical role on large‑scale, production systems
- Deep, hands‑on expertise in Java (Java 11+ preferred), including JVM behaviour, concurrency, and performance optimisation
- Strong, practical experience building and running systems on AWS, with a focus on real‑world operational trade‑offs
- Proven ability to implement and operate distributed systems at scale, with particular emphasis on performance and scalability
- Strong experience working with large databases or data platforms, including performance tuning and operational management
- Strong understanding of production operations, including incident management, observability, and reliability engineering
- Ability to influence and guide teams through technical credibility rather than formal authority
What the job involves
- We are seeking a Principal Engineer to act as the most senior hands‑on technical expert for our leading Risk Screening platform
- This role partners closely with architecture, service, product, and engineering teams to ensure that agreed designs are implemented to the highest technical and operational standards
- A core focus of the role is ownership of the system’s non‑functional characteristics, including end‑to‑end latency, cloud scalability, resilience, and the effective handling of large and growing data sets
- The Principal Engineer ensures these qualities are deliberately designed for, correctly implemented, and continuously validated in production
- Rather than owning architecture in isolation, the Principal Engineer is the expert implementor and problem solver: translating architectural intent into robust, performant, and secure production systems
- You will use your knowledge of AWS Services and Java development to tackle the hardest technical challenges, proactively identify operational risks, and provide deep technical guidance that sets the highest standard across all engineering teams working on the product
- This is the most senior individual contributor role with broad influence, focused on technical excellence, delivery confidence, and long‑term sustainability
- Act as the senior‑most technical authority for implementation within the Risk Screening platform, ensuring designs are realised accurately and pragmatically
- Work in close partnership with enterprise and solution architects to validate designs, challenge assumptions, and guide effective development approaches by the engineering teams
- Lead the implementation of the most complex and business‑critical changes, setting the standard for quality, performance, and maintainability
- Provide hands‑on expertise in Java‑based systems, including concurrency, performance tuning, memory management, and API design
- Take a leading role in defining, implementing, and validating non‑functional requirements, including system latency, throughput, scalability, and reliability
- Drive solutions for cloud scaling and capacity management, ensuring the platform performs predictably under variable and peak loads
- Provide deep expertise in working with large databases and data stores, including performance optimisation, data access patterns, and operational scaling
- Solve the most complex and ambiguous technical problems, particularly those spanning multiple components or teams
- Act as a point of escalation for deep technical issues that require system‑level understanding and experience
- Support engineering teams in making sound technical decisions, helping them understand trade‑offs and long‑term consequences
- Serve as a deep AWS expert, guiding teams on best‑practice use of AWS services with a strong focus on elastic cloud scaling and performance under load
- Ensure implementations support horizontal and vertical scaling, efficient resource utilisation, and predictable behaviour as demand grows
- Guide and review approaches to autoscaling, and workload management, aligned with agreed architectures
- Review cloud implementations to confirm they meet expectations for availability, scalability, cost-efficiency, and compliance
- Proactively identify operational risks, scaling limits, and reliability concerns within existing and planned implementations
- Drive improvements in resilience, monitoring, alerting, and incident prevention, informed by production behaviour
- Partner with Site Reliability Engineers, platform, and operations teams to improve system operability and reduce customer impact
- Champion engineering standards across coding, testing, deployment, and operational readiness
- Conduct deep technical reviews of critical changes, focusing on non‑functional requirements such as performance, security, and reliability
- Help teams reduce technical debt through pragmatic, incremental improvements aligned to product priorities
- Act as a technical mentor and coach to senior engineers and technical leads across the organisation
- Support engineers in developing stronger implementation skills and deeper system‑level thinking
- Influence engineering culture through example, constructive challenge, and a focus on practical excellence
Our take
The London Stock Exchange is one of the world’s oldest stock exchanges, with a history dating back over 300 years. It operates as a part of LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), one of the world’s leading providers of financial markets infrastructure, as a marketplace to enable stock brokers and traders to buy and sell stocks, bonds, and other securities.
The London Stock Exchange has lived through a stream of innovations; from telegraph and telephone, to the Market Price Display System, automatic trade matching, and the digitisation of issuer services. In 2019 it acquired Refinitiv, a financial information company, and in doing so became a global financial news and data business.
Over the last few years, the London Stock Exchange has made moves to support the evolution of private markets and further build its presence in this space. It partnered with Floww, a platform that connects investors with private companies, with aims to launch a private primary capital raising facility, as well as exploring new technologies and secondary market options for the platform.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
21% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
City of London, London, UK
Leadership
David Schwimmer
(CEO)Prior to joining LSEG in 2018, David was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs for over 20 years.
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