Lead Software Developer

Referment is working with a capital markets fintech whose quantitative analytics and software are used by financial institutions for derivatives pricing and risk management. The firm is investing in a modern cloud data platform that underpins its analytics products, and this Lead Software Developer will set the technical direction for it.

You'll provide technical leadership across the platform's backend and data initiatives, with a particular focus on a strategic move to Snowflake-based analytics and data services. It's a hands-on role that combines software development with ownership of cloud data architecture, database design and modern analytics — operating with a high degree of autonomy across multiple teams while mentoring other engineers.

The Role

• 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.
  
  

What We're Looking For

• A 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.
• Strong experience designing, implementing and operating Snowflake-based data platforms in production.
• 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 services such as EC2, S3, Lambda and Step Functions, plus infrastructure as code.
• Strong Python for automation, orchestration and data engineering.
• 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.
  
  

This could suit...

lead or staff engineers, data platform engineers or software architects who combine deep backend development with cloud data warehouse expertise and want to own technical direction.

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