Lead Software Engineer(Python/AWS/SQL)

Job Description Summary Roles at Lead IC level solve complex problems and guide others through code, design, and architecture. Scope includes

owning technical direction and architecture in a defined area, mentoring peers, and raising quality through reuse and hands-on

support. The impact is consistent, high-quality solutions that reduce duplication and accelerate team delivery.

ROLE SUMMARY

Are you a software developer who loves building software that actually gets used?

Join us at FTSE Russell! We’re building a team of engineers who care about software craftsmanship, clean code, and shipping things that matter. As a Software Engineer, you’ll build the services, libraries, and applications that power the indices trusted by financial institutions worldwide.

We work primarily in Python, so that’s our preference — but we care far more about whether you can genuinely build software than about which language you built it in. If your track record is in Java, C#, C, C++, Scala, Go, or Rust and you’re keen to work in Python, we want to hear from you. Strong engineers pick up a new language quickly; strong engineering judgement takes years.

This is a hands-on software development role. You’ll spend your days designing, coding, testing, and shipping — in a modern AWS environment, alongside engineers who review each other’s code, pair when it helps, and take real ownership of what they build. The systems you work on handle serious volumes of financial data, so there’s a rich data dimension to the problems — but the craft we’re hiring for is software engineering.

If you’ve built real software and want to keep building, we’d love to meet you.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING

We’re building the next-generation index data platform at FTSE Russell — and we want you to help build it:

Looking for 10+yrs of experience in writing production code, primarily in Python — services, APIs, libraries, and command-line tools that are modular, well-tested, and built to be maintained by others

• Designing and building software components end to end, from breaking down a problem through to deployment and support in production
• Applying modern software engineering practices every day: version control, trunk-based development, CI/CD, code review, refactoring, and automated testing (unit, integration, contract)
• Taking ownership of features and systems — you debug your own problems, fix them properly, and take responsibility for the quality of what you deliver
• Designing data models and integrations across relational databases (Aurora PostgreSQL) and object storage, thinking carefully about schema design, evolution, and backwards compatibility
• Building software that processes data at scale on AWS — Lambda, S3, containerised services, and where appropriate the AWS data stack (Glue, EMR Serverless)
• Building observability in from the start — structured logging, metrics, tracing, and meaningful alerting, so that we know how our software behaves in production
• Contributing to design and architecture discussions, and to our shared engineering standards
• Working directly with product and business teams to turn requirements into working software
• Learning the financial indices domain and sharing what you learn with the team

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

Essential — this is the bar:

• You have built and shipped real software. Not scripts and notebooks — applications, services, or libraries that other people depended on, that you maintained and evolved over time
• Python is our preference, but not a hard gate. Either you already write strong production Python, or you have that depth in another serious general-purpose language — Java, C#, C, C++, Scala, Go, or Rust — and are genuinely motivated to work in Python here. We’ll give you the time and support to get fluent
• You write clean, maintainable, testable, extensible code. In Python that means type hints, linters and formatters (ruff, mypy, black), and a genuine testing habit with pytest; we’d expect the equivalent discipline in whatever language you’ve come from
• Strong software engineering fundamentals — modular design, sensible abstractions, dependency management, packaging, error handling, and knowing when *not* to add a layer
• You are hands-on and want to stay hands-on. You enjoy being in the code
• Practical experience with Git-based workflows, code review, and CI/CD
• Strong experience with relational database…