Senior Technical Practitioner - Financial Services

Senior Technical Practitioner — Financial Services

About the Opportunity

We are looking for a Senior Technical Practitioner to join a long-term engagement with a fast-growing, technology-driven financial services organization.

This is a highly senior, hands-on individual contributor opportunity for someone who can operate as a peer to experienced engineering teams, shape architecture, identify technical risks, and solve complex, ambiguous problems.

This is not a traditional staff-augmentation or ticket-delivery role. You will be expected to bring independent technical judgment, challenge assumptions, review architectural and engineering decisions, and transfer knowledge to the broader organization.

What You'll Do

• Work closely with senior engineering and technology stakeholders to solve complex, ambiguous technical problems.

• Shape and review architecture for highly scalable, secure, and reliable financial systems.

• Design and improve production-critical systems involving payments, transaction processing, banking infrastructure, ledgers, or related financial platforms.

• Investigate complex technical issues beyond surface-level troubleshooting and identify underlying risks and opportunities.

• Challenge technical assumptions and provide clear, actionable recommendations.

• Participate in architecture and code reviews with highly experienced engineers.

• Drive initiatives from problem definition through solution, without requiring detailed task decomposition or constant supervision.

• Help establish engineering best practices around reliability, security, observability, and operational excellence.

• Share expertise and mentor experienced engineers through hands-on collaboration and technical discussions.

• Operate comfortably in an environment where requirements may be evolving and problems are not always clearly defined.

What We're Looking For

• 15+ years of relevant software engineering experience.

• Proven experience operating at Staff, Principal, Architect, or equivalent senior individual-contributor level.

• Strong track record designing, building, and owning complex production systems.

• Deep experience within financial services, such as:

  • Banking systems

  • Payments infrastructure

  • Transaction processing

  • Ledgers and financial data systems

  • Regulated financial infrastructure

  • Other production-critical, high-stakes financial systems

• Strong AWS expertise, particularly in complex production environments.

• Hands-on experience with areas such as:

  • Reliability and resilience

  • Security

  • Observability

  • Infrastructure architecture

  • Operating production workloads in regulated environments

• Ability to independently frame problems, investigate deeply, identify risks, and drive solutions.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to work directly with highly experienced technical peers.

• Willingness to constructively challenge existing technical decisions when appropriate.

• Demonstrated ability to transfer knowledge and raise the technical capability of the wider engineering organization.

Particularly Relevant Experience

Experience with any of the following will be highly valuable:

• Cross-border payments

• International remittances

• Multi-currency systems

• Digital banking or fintech platforms

• Financial ledgers

• Payment processing at scale

• Regulated financial services environments

• Experience with regulatory frameworks such as ADGM, DFSA, FCA, EU equivalents, or comparable jurisdictions

What Success Looks Like

The successful candidate is someone who:

• Can take an undefined technical problem and create structure around it.

• Doesn't wait for problems to be fully decomposed before taking action.

• Has the technical depth to challenge decisions made by other senior engineers.

• Can identify risks that may not be immediately obvious.

• Makes pragmatic, technically sound recommendations.

• Has personally owned systems operating at meaningful production scale.

• Can move fluidly between hands-on engineering, architecture, technical review, and mentoring.

• Acts as a trusted technical peer rather than simply an execution resource.

Location & Engagement

• Location: Ideally EMEA

• Engagement: Full-time

• Duration: Long-term

• Working hours: Must have meaningful overlap with Dubai / Gulf Standard Time (UTC+4)

• Relocation: There may be an opportunity or requirement to relocate to Dubai depending on the long-term engagement and mutual fit.

Interview Process

The process is expected to assess both technical depth and senior-level problem solving, including:

• Case-based architecture: Working through an ambiguous real-world technical problem.

• Systems design: Designing systems at scale, particularly around payments, ledgers, transaction processing, or cross-border financial infrastructure.

• AWS deep dive: Reliability, security, observability, and infrastructure decisions in production and regulated environments.

• Senior-level collaboration: Examples of challenging technical decisions, influencing peers, mentoring experienced engineers, and independently driving complex initiatives.