Lead Engineer - London, United Kingdom - Bobacommodities

Description

Boba Commodities are a successful, rapidly growing commodities trading firm with the wider purpose of investing into a better future for us all.

To invest our trading profits into community enhancing businesses across the globe that share our values.

Through our trading strategies, maximise the opportunity in the commodities and other markets to help us realise our vision.

Social value and long-term profit are inextricably linked. We are now looking to scale our technology infrastructure and levels of automation of our trading processes.

To add to the Engineering team, we are looking for a future orientated hands-on Lead Engineer who has a passion for software engineering, strong attention to detail, commercial focus and excellent communication to help support us and make our vision a reality.

Adapt & Evolve :
We are agile and growth oriented.

We ensure we listen to other ideas, regardless of the source and embrace cognitive diversity and creating a psychologically safe environment where every voice is heard.

• As a technical lead of the Engineering team, you will report directly into the Chief of Staff with the mission to design, deliver and communicate the technology vision and a curate a high performing, 'well-oiled' Engineering team. Work closely with the Leadership team to shape and make the technology vision a reality and be a force multiplier for our Engineering objectives and strategy.
• Be hands-on, actively contributing to the development process through writing & reviewing code, designing and implementing solutions and resolving technical challenges. Own and develop highly effective software development/SDLC processes and practices to reduce lead time to delivery and increase technical excellence.
• Mentor and coach the Engineering team in both technical skills and competencies for high performance and innovation, understanding them at a personal level to maximise their potential and productivity through effective coaching techniques.
• Sets high quality OKRs in line with business goals for self and team and holds self and team accountable for meeting or exceeding them.
• Sets KPIs for self and team that effectively measure the health of the Engineering function in line with business goals.

Why diversity and inclusion is highly important to us

Therefore, creating a workplace culture that advances belonging and psychological safety brings a mutual respect and acceptance of others and fuels our values of caring personally, adapting and evolving and the best ideas rising to the top.

Experienced and effective technical leader and people manager/coach for the team, with a proven track record of helping their teams reach their potential and a strong working knowledge of effective coaching techniques.

• Strong self-management such as self-awareness, adaptability, positivity, self-motivation, holding yourself and team to high standards.
• Experience developing software in SQL, Python and AWS, and ideally Javascript & VBA
• o Various AWS services, including but not limited to EC2, Lambda, Aurora, S3

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) together with AWS Fargate and orchestration tools e.g., o Current data paradigms e.g. stream processing (using Apache Kafka/Kinesis and Apache Flink), real-time architectures to enable downstream use-cases such as alerting and reporting
o Coding in Python & SQL
o Working with Relational Databases

o Knowledge of AWS security best practices, Identity and access management (IAM), encryption, and network security configurations to ensure a secure cloud environment.

o AWS networking concepts, including VPCs, subnets, security groups, NAT gateways, VPNs, and direct connect to design and implement scalable and fault-tolerant network architectures
o Managing data engineering pipelines through Apache Airflow
o Maintenance and optimisation of CI/CD pipelines and other automation processes in AWS Code Pipeline
o Knowledge and experience with Git (branching strategies and repo management)
o Monitoring tools like AWS CloudWatch to proactively identify issues and troubleshoot system performance
o Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform to automate and manage infrastructure deployments
o AWS backup and disaster recovery solutions, such as AWS Backup and Amazon S3 versioning, to ensure data protection and business continuity

o Best practices like Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), Test Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Performance Testing using open-source toolsets.

o Building custom dashboards using React framework, Angular, , HTML, CSS and JavaScript

• Have deep hands-on experience in designing and building low-latency trading or comparable infrastructures and related operational/trading processes.
• Have hands-on experience in building rules based automation or machine learning technology solutions for trading e.g. automation of trading strategies or other intellectual property.
• Have a passion for building pragmatic technology solutions that focus on delivering the most value over time.
• Have excellent skills, experience and a passion for mentoring and coaching more junior Engineers in both technical skills and in highly productive ways of working; Able to marshal an Engineering team effectively, being clear and consistently acting in line with the best interests of the business and being firm on bringing the team back on track when we deviate from it.
• Have a deep understanding of working methods such as Agile, Kanban, Scrum, DevOps and CI/CD tools and best practices and successful experience in embedding them in teams.

Ideally will be a bonus if you have the following...

• Programming experience in C#
• Experience in designing and implementing RESTful APIs for accessing AWS Aurora to source data for the analytics
• Experience of Microsoft Power Bl /Tableau or other data visualization program to create effective dashboards and reports

Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Excel.

• Expertise/strong awareness and ability to recruit in software engineering/technology domain.

Decommissioning our legacy excel processes and migrating to strategic, scalable solutions.

• Leading and enabling the Engineering team as a 'well-oiled machine'.
• Delivering and embedding effective testing automation toolsets and practices.
• Trading, Trading Risk Analysts and Finance).
• Oversee and minimise technology maintenance work through best engineering practices.
• Build strong trust and psychological safety within Engineering team and be a culture carrier for the broader company as a senior employee.
• Own and deliver improvements on Engineering KPIs

Is hungry to help build the company - a proactive and enthusiastic force to improve our capabilities.

• Loves coding and loves putting technology to use in a pragmatic way.
• We are small but growing fast and we need the right people who can help us grow and retain and embed our culture and values. The goal of this is to help you decide whether you would like to pursue the next steps of the interview process and embark on this journey with us. We would love to host you at our office and meet you in person, and we will pay any associated travel costs. This will be broken down into a task that involves some coding/code walk through for about 45 mins and a technical discussion regarding system design for about 15 mins.

Break:
One of your potential future team will take you for a coffee/tea/beverage for an informal chat with you for 10-15mins for you to ask any questions about the role, Boba or anything else
This will be in-person in our office again, and we will pay any associated travel costs.

Ahead of this round, we will provide an Engineering case study and the opportunity to elicit any further functional requirements or clarifications from one of the team.

We typically ask one of the team you've not met yet to take you for a tea/coffee for up to 15mins).
On top of a culture of personal growth, caring personally, inclusivity where your ideas are heard and often implemented, we can offer:

• £110-120K Annual salary plus annual discretionary performance bonus.
• Support from a professionally qualified Coach to help you achieve your personal and professional goals.
• Work/life balance. We mainly trade in US markets, and as a result need to ensure we have Engineering available to support the Trading team. Comprehensive health care cover, including mental health, dental and optical cover, with zero excess for the employee (and tax is paid by us) Life Insurance and Income Protection via YuLife
• Physical health allowance where we provide an allowance to each employee to use towards a physical activity of their choice (e.g., gym membership, Brazilian ju-jitsu, personal trainer, running club; 39 days holiday, to be taken whenever you want subject to ensuring we have operational and trading coverage. We do not mandate you work public holidays nor do we mandate you must take them off, instead we recognise that UK bank holidays do not always align to important dates for everyone so give our employees the choice
• Pension contribution
• Boba Day – an optional annual away day for socialising and training together
• 'Other examples of situational/ad-hoc schemes we have run for our employees:
• Social events & celebratory gifts for achieving team goals

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