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.