Senior Java / Kotlin Engineer - Prime Brokerage

About the role

We’re looking for a senior engineer to join us working in in our embedded team within Prime Brokerage, the area of the bank that works with hedge funds and large institutional clients. You’ll work hands-on to build data-intensive systems with huge scale. The role carries real ownership and you will help develop the regulatory and client reporting book of work whilst modernising the systems that deliver it.

The Client Reporting platform sits at the heart of Prime Brokerage, taking client data in from upstream systems, transforming and mastering it, and delivering reports and data feeds to clients and to many downstream systems across the bank. You will work across new and existing Kotlin and Java applications, with new development primarily in Kotlin. Large databases and messaging at scale will be a significant part of the role.

You’ll work on big banking systems, absorb the domain, understand why systems are the way they are, and improve and evolve them incrementally and safely. We’re looking for engineers with excellent taste.

What you will do

• Drive delivery of the regulatory and client reporting book of work, where change is constant and deadlines can be market- or regulator-driven.
• Build and maintain data transformation pipelines moving data between SQL Server, MongoDB, Kafka/EMS, and downstream consumers.
• Engage directly with upstream data providers, downstream consumers, and business SMEs to understand requirements and the history of the systems.
• Modernise the existing stack: a flagship example is transforming large SQL Server stored procedures into well-tested Kotlin services.
• Dig into performance and correctness at the database level - you should be comfortable reasoning about things like logical vs physical reads when a report is slow.
• Help with platform modernisation, for example migrating scheduling from legacy tech (Autosys) onto Kubernetes/OpenShift.

Essential skills and experience

• Strong Java and Kotlin. (C# exposure is a plus but not essential).
• Heavy database experience: expert SQL and relational modelling on SQL Server, including performance analysis and working with stored-procedures.
• MongoDB (documents and collections, aggregation/map-reduce).
• Messaging and streaming: Kafka, Solace, Tibco EMS or similar.
• Building and consuming REST APIs and RPC services.
• Containers and orchestration with OpenShift/Kubernetes.
• Focus on observability: ELK, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus.
• Focus on automated, shift-left testing: integration tests, building harnesses, valuable end-to-end and regression testing.
• A track record of work on large banking or reporting systems: understanding a complex domain, understanding the history of a system, and collaborating with disparate teams.
• Comfortable operating within the constraints of a large regulated bank - VDIs, change control, release processes, and security review.

Desirable

• Prime Brokerage or wider markets/securities domain experience are useful.
• Exposure to BigData cloud tech such as Starburst/Trino and Snowflake.
• Experience developing/migrating batch/scheduled workloads at scale.
• Experience modernising legacy systems incrementally - wrapping tests around untested code, then refactoring with confidence.
• Practical/effective use of AI coding assistants (e.g. Copilot with recent models).

What kind of person thrives here

• Pragmatic and delivery-focused: you balance modernisation ambitions against the need to ship the book of work month by month.
• Self-starting in ambiguous environments: requirements often live in people’s heads and in the systems themselves, and you go and find the answers.
• A strong communicator who builds relationships with SMEs, upstream teams, and stakeholders across time zones.
• Resilient to the realities of banking: restrictions, approvals, and legacy constraints are navigated, not fought.