Senior or Principal Software Engineer (Pricing & Market...

Contract Type: FTC (12 months)

Start Date: 2nd March 2026

Seniority Level: Senior or Principal Software Engineer

Location: London (hybrid) - 3 days/week in the office

Role Overview

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior or Principal Software Engineer to take a key technical leadership role across a business‑critical pricing and distribution platform within the commodity markets. This is a deeply hands‑on engineering position combined with architectural influence, technical strategy, and mentoring responsibilities.

You will lead a full technical review and stabilisation of an established production system before defining and driving its modernisation roadmap. Operating in a fast‑paced, time‑critical environment, you will ensure the platform is resilient, scalable, performant, and aligned with modern engineering and architectural best practices. This position requires regular onsite presence (minimum three days per week).

Key Responsibilities

Platform Analysis & Stabilisation

• Conduct a comprehensive deep dive into the existing pricing and distribution platform, including codebase, data flows, performance, reliability, and security.

• Identify and document technical debt, operational risks, and scalability limitations.

• Define a pragmatic remediation and modernisation roadmap.

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Establish and embed engineering standards, agile development practices, and delivery disciplines.

• Shape the long‑term technical direction in alignment with cloud‑native, real‑time pricing and event‑driven architectural principles.

• Introduce architecture governance, design standards, and system‑wide technical strategy.

• Provide senior technical oversight for all critical changes and production‑sensitive workflows.

Engineering Excellence & Delivery

• Lead the delivery of high‑performance, production‑grade services in a mission‑critical environment.

• Strengthen engineering fundamentals including code quality, testing strategy, CI/CD pipelines, release discipline, and observability.

• Improve documentation, transparency, and repeatability across engineering processes.

Knowledge Transfer & Team Maturity

• Rapidly gain deep domain and platform knowledge to reduce single‑person dependency risks.

• Mentor engineers and constructively challenge existing approaches to foster continuous improvement.

• Enhance team collaboration, decision‑making, and technical maturity.

Architecture & Modernisation

• Drive the transition from legacy batch/data‑movement patterns to event‑driven, near real‑time pricing and distribution models.

• Introduce design‑led thinking, domain‑driven design, and clearer system boundaries.

• Recommend future platform evolution across data, services, messaging, and cloud integration.

Candidate Profile

• A senior, highly credible technologist with a strong ability to influence and challenge constructively.

• Hands‑on problem solver with deep experience stabilising and modernising legacy systems.

• Strong systems thinker with a design‑led mindset and a focus on sustainable delivery.

• Operates calmly and effectively in high‑pressure, time‑critical production environments.

• Comfortable working with ambiguity, limited documentation, and complex stakeholder landscapes.

• Promotes transparency, discipline, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications & Experience

Core Technical Expertise (Must Have)

• Extensive experience with C# / .NET , including building and refactoring large‑scale production systems.

• Strong Microsoft SQL Server knowledge, including performance tuning and schema design.

• Experience with SSIS , ETL/data‑pipeline design, and data‑movement patterns.

• Proficiency with Azure (IaaS/PaaS) and Azure DevOps (CI/CD, release pipelines, IaC).

Architecture & Engineering Skills

• Designing and operating high‑performance, low‑latency distributed systems .

• Experience with event‑driven and messaging architectures (e.g., Service Bus, Kafka‑style patterns).

• Real‑time data processing and pricing systems.

• Expertise in resilience engineering, high availability, and disaster recovery.

• Strong observability discipline: logging, metrics, tracing, diagnostics.

Domain Experience (Strongly Preferred)

• Financial services, trading, pricing, or market‑infrastructure environments.

• Commodity markets or other time‑sensitive pricing/distribution systems.

• Experience in regulated, business‑critical production environments.

Experience Level

• 10+ years of senior hands‑on engineering experience.

• Several years operating at Principal Engineer, Lead Engineer, or Architect level.

• Demonstrated success modernising legacy platforms without impacting stability.

• Experience working in high‑pressure front‑office or trading‑adjacent environments.

Vantage Point Global is a fully committed Equal Opportunities, inclusive employer. We are passionate about attracting diverse talent, and welcome applications regardless of ethnicity, culture, age, gender, nationality, religion, disability, or sexual orientation.

Things you need to know:

• To apply, you’ll need to provide us with a CV and answer a few questions.

• If you have not heard back from us within three weeks of the date of application, we will not be progressing your application.