Prinicpal Engineer

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About the London Metal Exchange:

The London Metal Exchange is the world centre for the trading of industrial metals the majority of all non-ferrous metal futures business is transacted on our platforms. A member of HKEX Group the LME brings together participants from the physical industry and the financial community to create a robust and regulated market where there is always a buyer and a seller where there is always a price and where there is always the opportunity to transfer or take on risk 24 hours a day.

The Sustainability and Physical Markets team (SPM) is responsible for the strategy delivery and operation of the LMEs physical market and sustainability activity. This incorporates both strategic development of all areas of the LMEs physical ecosystem including future commercialisation sustainability overall management of physical market relationships including producers of LME-listed brands and the operation of the LMEs physical network including LME warehousing operation of the LME approved brands list LME responsible sourcing and LMEpassport.

Purpose of Role:

This role is a critical part of the new technology team supporting the SPM team providing key engineering skills deputising for the Head of SPM technology and working with the wider technology teams to integrate SPMs new and existing services effectively. The role will be working closely alongside the SPM business team and technology vendors to engineer solutions supporting their strategic roadmap.

This is a high-impact role for a candidate who is passionate about engineering excellence working directly with business teams to create solutions and enabling tangible value through technology. This role is a full-stack engineering role (covering frontend backend data infrastructure) and collaborates on solution design implementation deployment testing and support.

Responsibilities:

• Act as the escalation point for high-priority technical issues and deputise for the Head of SPM Technology when required.

• Provide day-to-day technical oversight for SPM external vendors ensuring alignment with the Physical Markets strategy and LMEs technical standards.

• Lead the development of SPMs technical capabilities collaborating with business teams and vendors to deliver on strategic objectives.

• Design implement and maintain integration solutions across the wider technology estate to meet SPM and departmental needs.

• Develop execute and own detailed test plans for all solutions (including vendor-delivered applications) ensuring comprehensive automated and manual test coverage (integration functional and non-functional).

• Review source code changes and documentation to validate implementation quality and test coverage.

• Coordinate with InfoSec and Compliance teams to enforce technical security and regulatory standards.

• Own the reliability stability and performance of SPM vendor-delivered platforms (e.g. LMEpassport LMEsword) including proactive improvements and incident/root cause analysis.

• Take ownership of CI/CD pipelines for SPM systems utilising infrastructure as code (e.g. Helm Terraform Ansible) and define/maintain quality gates and test coverage within the CI/CD process.

• Ensure robust application telemetry is in place including monitoring tracing metrics logging and alerting (e.g. Prometheus Grafana).

• Represent SPM needs to internal platform and deployment teams (e.g. MetAl Platform).

• Act as a liaison between technical teams and non-technical stakeholders ensuring clear communication of project status risks and requirements.

• Ensure all technical documentation is accurate up-to-date and accessible to relevant stakeholders

Academic and Professional Qualifications Required:

• Required: Bachelors degree in Computer Science Software Engineering Data Science or a closely related field.

• Advantageous: Certifications or substantial hands-on experience with modern data pipeline tools (e.g. Apache Airflow Spark Kafka dbt or similar).

• Desirable: Familiarity with financial services regulatory frameworks (e.g. MiFID II GDPR SOX) and best practices for data governance and security.

Required Knowledge and Level of Experience:

• Experience: Minimum 10 years in software engineering with significant involvement in at least one production-grade software system within financial services or a similarly regulated industry.

• System Quality & Testing: Demonstrated expertise in validating system correctness through robust software testing processes including automated testing frameworks (unit integration end-to-end).

• Development Practices: Experience with test-driven development (TDD) and/or behaviour-driven development (BDD) and a strong advocate for quality assurance throughout the software lifecycle.

• Full-Stack Engineering: Hands-on experience with Java (Spring Boot) React and Python covering backend frontend and data engineering.

• Data Engineering Tools: Proficient with modern data engineering and analytics platforms (e.g. Apache Airflow Spark Kafka dbt Snowflake or similar).

• DevOps & Cloud: Experience with containerisation (Docker Kubernetes) CI/CD pipelines and cloud platforms (e.g. AWS Azure GCP) is highly desirable and increasingly standard for senior roles.

• Stakeholder Engagement: Proven experience working with C-level stakeholders translating complex business requirements into effective technology solutions and influencing technology strategy.

Skills set and Core Competencies Required for Role:

• Programming & Data: Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for data engineering and analytics.

• DevOps: Skilled in building deploying and maintaining containerised applications using Docker and Kubernetes; experience with infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform Helm) is a plus.

• Linux: Deep understanding of Linux systems administration and scripting.

• Testing: Commitment to automated testing and quality assurance with experience integrating these practices into CI/CD pipelines.

• Monitoring & Observability: Familiarity with monitoring logging and alerting tools (e.g. Prometheus Grafana Splunk) is advantageous.

• Analytical & Problem-Solving: Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with a focus on delivering measurable business impact and system reliability.

• Agile & Leadership: Ability to lead and work effectively in agile cross-functional teams and drive collaborative solution design and delivery.

• Communication: Strong communication skills able to engage and translate between technical and non-technical stakeholders and influence at all levels.

Personal Qualities:

• Curiosity & Proactivity: Demonstrates a passion for continuous learning improvement and staying current with industry trends and emerging technologies.

• Collaboration: Works effectively across departments and disciplines building strong relationships with both technology and business colleagues.

• Outcome-Driven: Motivated by delivering real-world outcomes improving enterprise value and supporting business strategy.

• Leadership: Inspires and mentors others fosters a culture of engineering excellence and champions best practices in technology delivery.

The LME is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity recruiting for our teams we welcome the unique contributions that you can bring in terms of education ethnicity race sex gender identity expression and reassignment nation of origin age languages spoken colour religion disability sexual orientation and doing so we want every LME employee to feel our commitment to showing respect for all and encouraging open collaboration and communication.