Lead Software Developer - Cloud Data Platform

About the role

A capital markets fintech, whose quantitative analytics and software are used by financial institutions for derivatives pricing and risk management, is investing in a modern cloud data platform. Referment is recruiting a Lead Software Developer to set the technical direction of the platform, providing technical leadership across backend and data initiatives with a focus on moving to Snowflake-based analytics and data services. The role is hands-on, combining software development with cloud data architecture, database design and modern analytics, with a high degree of autonomy across multiple teams and mentoring of other engineers.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of the data platform architecture, setting standards across storage, integration, analytics and governance.
• Drive adoption of Snowflake-based solutions for reporting, analytics, AI-enabled data products and enterprise data warehousing.
• Own database architecture, performance tuning, operational excellence and cost optimisation across Snowflake, PostgreSQL and SQL Server.
• Design and maintain scalable data ingestion, transformation and integration pipelines.
• Build analytics and self-service reporting capabilities, including semantic models and BI platform integration.
• Partner with backend engineers on scalable Java services, APIs and distributed systems, and contribute to cloud-native development on AWS with modern DevOps practices.
• Develop Python tooling for automation, data processing and orchestration.
• Define engineering standards and platform consistency, and mentor engineers across teams.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering or a related field.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience building enterprise-scale applications and platforms.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex technical projects with minimal supervision.
• Strong relational database expertise (SQL Server or PostgreSQL), including query optimisation and performance tuning for transactional applications.
• Solid grounding in data engineering, data warehousing, dimensional modelling and OLAP concepts.
• Strong Java development using Spring Boot, Hibernate/JPA, REST APIs and microservices.
• Strong AWS experience across EC2, S3, Lambda and Step Functions, plus infrastructure as code.
• Understanding of distributed systems, event-driven architectures and messaging platforms such as Kafka.
• Strong communication, mentoring and stakeholder management, with the ability to influence technical direction beyond your own team.

Desirable

• Experience with Snowflake Cortex (semantic views, AI/ML capabilities, agents and AI-assisted analytics) or building AI-powered data products.
• Familiarity with modern BI tools such as Power BI or Tableau.
• Practical use of AI tools to improve software development workflows.