Project description

AI-powered products reduce the costs, complexities, and timescales of trade finance processing for banks and large corporations. The scalable platform uses proprietary Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to accurately digitise documents into a readable format and then applies machine learning algorithms to scrutinise them for compliance with international trading rules and regulations.

Who is hire (our customer description)

We are a group of people around the world where seasoned veterans with 20+ years’ experience in Finance and Technology work alongside associates who are just starting out and exploring the FinTech space. Our diverse backgrounds, competencies and experiences are just a few reasons why we have made progress toward achieving our vision. We aim to grow together as a team and a company so we can live fulfilled personal & professional lives.

What You Will Do

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Software Engineer with 7+ years of professional software development experience to join our engineering team. You are a self-actuating, objective-driven engineer who thrives in environments that demand deep technical ownership and mature judgment. You proactively identify high-leverage opportunities, drive complex initiatives to completion with minimal oversight, and consistently deliver measurable impact aligned with business goals. You are equally comfortable working independently on challenging problems or as a collaborative member of an Agile Scrum team. You excel at managing multiple concurrent tasks and problems, self-prioritizing effectively based on business impact, urgency, and strategic alignment. You operate with a high degree of independence while maintaining strong situational awareness. This includes understanding broader context, knowing when to seek collaboration or input, when to follow established direction, and when to escalate risks or blockers early.

You lead by example in building quality production systems that are maintainable, observable, and manageable, adhering to software engineering best practices. Technically proficient, articulate, and creatively innovative, you direct your efforts toward the highest-leverage areas. These include mentoring, crafting novel solutions to complex problems, exploring emerging technologies, and driving architectural changes and refactoring.

Technical Skills:

• Guides projects toward sound engineering decisions balancing technical excellence, debt management, reliability, observability, scalability, and business needs.

• Proactively proposes and negotiates scope/priority changes in response to evolving requirements, often introducing creative alternatives.

• Leads new solutions, refactoring, and architectural evolution with pragmatic trade-offs, clear debt-repayment plans, and innovative design patterns.

• Thrives on complex, ambiguous problems, including debugging production issues rapidly, resolving incidents, or designing in unfamiliar domains with inventive approaches.

• Demonstrates leadership beyond code: drives design processes, facilitates discussions, and produces clear documentation, alerts, runbooks, and operational guides.

• 7+ years of professional full-stack full-lifecycle software development experience.

• Expert-level proficiency in Python and strong hands-on experience across the full stack.

• Proven track record designing, building, and operating distributed, microservices-based, event-driven systems, with meaningful exposure to AI, machine learning, and agentic systems (no requirement to be an ML specialist).

• Deep expertise in RESTful APIs, asynchronous processing, message queues (RabbitMQ, Kafka, etc.), and modern architectural patterns.

• Strong experience with SQL and NoSQL database design and optimization.

• Hands-on mastery of containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud platforms (Azure preferred).

• Advocates and implements rigorous automated testing (unit, integration, end-to-end) and observability standards.

• Excellent communication: articulates complex technical concepts clearly to engineers, product stakeholders, and leadership.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect, design, and implement end-to-end scalable, reliable, and performant features and systems across our trade finance platform, incorporating creative and innovative solutions where they add significant value.

• Independently own full-lifecycle delivery of major initiatives, from requirements through development, testing, deployment, and post-launch operation.

• Define, enforce, and evolve engineering best practices, coding standards, design patterns, testing strategies, and architectural guidelines.

• Develop robust core services and components with clean, modular architecture and well-defined API contracts.

• Drive comprehensive testing and quality assurance, ensuring high-confidence releases.

• Collaborate with the Director of Engineering, Product, and domain experts to translate business needs into effective technical solutions, proactively surfacing risks, alternatives, and innovative ideas.

• Mentor and guide engineers through code reviews, design reviews, pair programming, and technical coaching, fostering a culture of creativity and experimentation.

• Continuously improve workflows, CI/CD pipelines, system reliability, and operational excellence through innovative approaches.

• Evaluate and champion new technologies or approaches (including AI/ML advancements) that enhance capability, velocity, or resilience, bringing forward creative applications.

Key Attributes:

• Highly proactive and self-directed: spots issues, opportunities, and risks early; takes decisive action without waiting for explicit direction.

• Strong context awareness: deeply understands business priorities, user needs, and system implications to maximize value.

• Excellent judgment on autonomy vs. collaboration: drives independently but knows when to loop in stakeholders, seek perspectives, align with direction, or escalate.

• Outcome-oriented mindset: focuses on measurable results and sustainable systems over mere activity.

• Versatile work style: thrives working solo on independent problems or contributing effectively in Agile Scrum ceremonies and team sprints.

• Multitasking and prioritization mastery: comfortably handles multiple tasks/problems simultaneously, self-prioritizing based on impact and urgency.

• Creative and innovative approach: naturally generates original ideas, experiments with new techniques, and applies unconventional thinking to solve problems and create value.

Coding

• Modern Python (>=3.11)

• FastAPI

• Asyncio

• Type annotation and inspection

• Libraries and packaging

• Java

• MongoDB

• Shell (usually Bash)

• Debugging and IDEs Tech

• Database principles (ACID, normalisation, etc)

• SQL (if only to prove familiarity with database thinking)

• Schemeless databases in principle (MongoDB, Couchbase, Redis).

• MongoDB aggregations a plus

• Linux system administration, scripting, installation, etc.

• Linux desktop use.

• Message queues and PubSub

• Docker

• VMs, cloud deployment, etc

• Kubernetes.

Impact

• Independently owns and drives delivery of large, ambiguous, or high-complexity projects from ideation through deployment and ongoing operation, consistently advancing team and company objectives.

• Proactively identifies, self-prioritizes, and pursues high-leverage opportunities across codebase, architecture, processes, or team practices through creative refactoring, innovative improvements, mentoring, or strategic input.

• Serves as a trusted problem solver for critical incidents, complex bugs, or architectural challenges, leading resolutions with calm, decisive, and inventive action under pressure.

• Actively mentors engineers, providing candid, constructive feedback to support their technical and professional growth while encouraging creative thinking.

• Influences better technical and product outcomes by proactively offering well-reasoned, innovative feedback on projects within and adjacent to your domain