Senior Developer

Job Purpose

ICE is seeking a senior developer to join the team that builds the next-gen reference data backbone for ICE's derivatives trading platform. Our Reference Data System (RDS) is the authoritative source for the dynamic instrument definitions and trading sessions that ICE's trading platform depends on. Correctness here is not optional; without valid reference data, markets cannot open.

The trading platform that RDS enables underpins some of the world's most consequential financial benchmarks: ICE Brent Crude, the reference price for approximately 80% of globally traded crude oil, and the LBMA Gold Price, which serves as the global settlement benchmark for gold used by central banks, producers, and investors worldwide.

In addition to reference data, this team also owns the auction engine behind the LBMA Gold Price, as well as specialized trading engines that support price discovery of select global energy benchmarks.

This is a small, high-ownership team. You will design and build mission-critical production systems. There is no throwing it over the wall to QA or ops teams; the engineer who ships a feature owns it through production. Our SDLC is AI-native, and we use modern AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor. Our platforms are built on Kotlin and modern Java, Spring Boot, Oracle databases, Kafka, Redis, and gRPC.

A strong candidate will have a product mentality and deep ownership. Beyond specific technology experience, it is more important for the candidate to have a strong sense of what constitutes good software, be conscientious in picking the right technology, and have an open and pragmatic mindset.

We value engineers who have owned systems at depth over time: people who built something, maintained it in production, and understood the consequences of their decisions months later. We're looking for engineers who have stayed with systems long enough to see their decisions play out - through incidents, migrations, and years of growth.

We invest in each other through code review, shared design discussions, and mentorship. We believe the team's growth is as important as the system's.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and support the ICE reference data system and derivatives trading and auction engines
• Own features end-to-end, from system design and implementation through production support
• Build and maintain the data pipelines, caching layers, and APIs that trading systems depend on
• Work directly with clients, quality assurance, and product management to shape requirements and deliver high-quality solutions
• Contribute to system architecture decisions with real influence over how the platform evolves
• Collaborate in a small team where every engineer has significant scope and impact

Knowledge and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field with 5+ years of Java development experience; master's degree with 3+ years; or equivalent professional experience
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills to work well in a team environment and directly with business stakeholders
• Experience with and strong understanding of:
• Multi-threaded server-side development and Java concurrency primitives like thread pools, locks, concurrent data structures
• Core Java / Java collections
• Relational databases such as Oracle or Postgres
• Performance tuning, debugging, and memory profiling
• Unit, integration, and end-to-end tests
• UNIX/Linux commands and tools
• Demonstrable experience in design and system architecture
• Good understanding of common design and architectural principles
• Comfort adopting and excelling with AI coding tools

Preferred

• Domain experience with trading systems or other fintech
• Kotlin
• Kafka
• Redis
• Front-end development with JavaScript, React, HTML, and CSS
• Docker containers and Kubernetes