Senior Director, Lead Engineer & Architect (Full Stack / Blockchain)

We’re seeking a future team member for the role of Senior Director, Lead Engineer & Architect (Full Stack / Blockchain) to join our team. This role is located in London.

In this role, you’ll make an impact in the following ways:

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture of a new, high-profile platform that combines modern web applications, distributed services and distributed ledger technology.

• Lead and grow a team of full-stack engineers as a hands-on player-manager: set technical direction, mentor and develop engineers, and stay in the code yourself.

• Design and build front-end and back-end components, and their integration with smart contracts and the ledger layer, holding the team to a high standard of clean, well-tested, maintainable code.

• Define and evolve the platform's architecture for usability, scalability, performance, security and resilience, making pragmatic trade-offs and documenting key decisions.

• Shape how the platform integrates with internal and external parties through clear, versioned and well-documented APIs, in line with the firm's enterprise API standards.

• Partner with product owners, business analysts, scrum masters and senior business stakeholders to turn complex business processes into a coherent technical roadmap and deliverable increments.

• Drive engineering excellence across the team: automated testing, continuous integration and delivery, code review, observability and secure-by-design practices.

• Represent the platform in architecture governance forums, and work with platform, security, infrastructure and enterprise architecture teams to take it from MVP to production and beyond.

• Stay current with developments in digital assets and distributed ledger technology, and assess where they can benefit the platform and the business.

To be successful in this role, we’re seeking the following:

• Extensive experience in financial services technology, including senior technical leadership of complex, business-critical platforms.

• A proven record as a hands-on architect and engineer who still writes production code, combined with leading and developing engineering teams.

• Delivery experience on blockchain or distributed ledger projects, including smart contract development and an understanding of its security, testing and operational considerations.

• Broad full-stack depth built over a career, across several back-end languages and frameworks and several front-end frameworks, with the judgement to choose and evolve the right tools for a problem.

• Deep knowledge of distributed and microservice architectures, modular front-end architectures, reactive and responsive UX design, and API-first design.

• Experience designing for high availability, scalability and resilience, including containerised and cloud-native deployment.

• A strong command of modern CI/CD, automated testing strategies and DevOps practices.

• Experience in Agile environments, with the ability to balance delivery pressure against long-term architectural health.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management, with the credibility to influence senior technology and business leaders.