Role Overview
Are you an engineer who enjoys solving complex production problems as much as building the solutions that prevent them—and who can lead others through ambiguity to deliver lasting improvements?
As a Lead Production Engineer, you will combine hands-on engineering with end-to-end ownership of a significant technical domain, platform, or cross-team initiative. You will work closely with traders, portfolio managers, Operations, Finance, and technology teams to ensure critical production systems are reliable, resilient, and continuously improving.
The role combines leadership in live production with delivery of strategic engineering improvements. You will play a leading role in BAM’s global follow-the-sun support model, monitoring production and providing first- and second-line support for applications spanning Middle Office, P&L, accounting, treasury, and related business functions.
You will use insights from live systems to lead the design and delivery of tooling, automation, observability, and platform improvements that make the technology estate healthier, more resilient, and easier to operate.
This role requires strong coding skills, systems thinking and design, operational experience, and the ability to set technical direction, manage dependencies and trade-offs, and communicate clearly with both technical and business stakeholders.
The Role in Practice
Technical Leadership and Delivery
- Own a significant technical domain, platform, or cross-team initiative end-to-end, setting the technical direction from problem definition and design through delivery, production adoption, and continuous improvement.
- Lead design decisions, establish engineering and operational standards, anticipate architectural risks, and resolve complex problems with material business or operational impact.
- Apply business, operational, risk, cost, and support considerations to technical and process design. Translate technical detail into clear business options, trade-offs, risks, and recommendations to support effective decision-making.
- Set clear outcomes and delivery plans, manage dependencies and ambiguity, and communicate progress, risks, and delivery trade-offs transparently to technical and business stakeholders.
- Build trusted relationships across Technology, Portfolio Management, Operations, Finance, Treasury, and external vendors. Lead difficult discussions, align competing priorities, and ensure delivery remains focused on agreed business outcomes.
- Coach engineers through technical guidance, design reviews, incident leadership, and knowledge sharing, strengthening the team’s engineering and operational capability.
Live Production
- Own operational outcomes for critical applications supporting trade booking, position management, P&L, accounting, reference data, treasury, and related Operations and Finance workflows.
- Lead the response to complex production incidents across applications, databases, infrastructure, integrations, and business processes. Coordinate technical and business stakeholders to restore service quickly, provide clear updates, and ensure effective prevention of recurrence.
- Define and manage service reliability through SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, service-health trends, error budgets, capacity signals, and incident analysis. Partner with engineering and operational teams to establish actionable alerting and drive sustained reliability improvement.
- Support critical integrations and connectivity, including vendor data feeds, APIs, messaging platforms, FIX connectivity, managed file transfers, and secure vendor or counterparty onboarding.
- Ensure the safe operation of critical daily processes, including end-of-day P&L, accounting, reconciliations, downstream data loads, and key vendor or counterparty integrations.
- Support BAM’s global follow-the-sun model through effective handovers and participation in escalation support. Lead safe, well-controlled change through releases, launches, testing, and production-readiness activities, engaging business stakeholders where required.
Engineering for Production
- Turn production insight and business priorities into engineering solutions that improve the resilience, operability, and health of BAM’s technology estate.
- Lead the development of observability, automation, and operational capabilities, including monitoring, alerting, telemetry, dashboards, traceability, recoverability, capacity management, and production readiness.
- Deliver real-time services, tooling, and automation across cloud and on-premises environments, event streaming, message buses, containerised services, and FaaS architectures, with opportunities to work in Rust, C#, Python, and other technologies.
- Apply AI and automation to incident knowledge, diagnostics, and remediation, reducing manual effort and improving the detection and resolution of recurring issues.
- Work across teams and unfamiliar codebases to improve existing services, automate repetitive processes, and deliver permanent fixes rather than temporary workarounds.
- Drive strong operational practices across incident and change management, service ownership, documentation, and continuous improvement, ensuring these standards are adopted consistently across the domain.
What You’ll Bring
- Significant experience as a Production Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Software Engineer, or in a similar hands-on engineering role.
- Demonstrated experience leading the technical design and delivery of a significant system, platform, operational domain, or cross-team initiative.
- Strong hands-on experience building and maintaining software in a modern programming language. Our engineering estate includes Python, Rust, C#, and other languages; experience in comparable languages is equally valued.
- Experience building observability and monitoring using OpenTelemetry, the Grafana observability stack—including Prometheus, Loki, and Alertmanager—and ITRS Geneos.
- Strong knowledge of reliability engineering practices, including SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, alerting, incident management, capacity management, operational readiness, and post-incident improvement.
- Experience with SQL and relational databases, including Microsoft SQL Server; familiarity with NoSQL technologies is beneficial.
- Hands-on experience with production systems involving relational databases and modern infrastructure patterns, such as cloud platforms, event streaming, message buses, containerised services, or distributed applications.
- Experience building, operating, and monitoring production services in AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or another major cloud environment.
- Strong troubleshooting skills across application, database, infrastructure, integration, and workflow layers.
- Experience supporting financial systems, production controls, reconciliations, or exception-management workflows is beneficial. A willingness and ability to learn trading, P&L, accounting, treasury, and operational workflows is essential.
- Ability to communicate technical concepts, delivery risks, and architectural trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Relevant college degree or equivalent professional experience.
What We Value
- End-to-end ownership and a focus on measurable business outcomes.
- Sound technical judgement that balances reliability, resilience, delivery speed, maintainability, operational risk, and cost.
- Clear, direct, and transparent communication, particularly during incidents and delivery challenges.
- Strong operational discipline and a commitment to continuously improving production standards, controls, and ways of working.
- A culture-building mindset that develops people, strengthens global support practices, and promotes knowledge sharing.
- The ability to prioritise effectively and perform well in a fast-paced trading environment.
- A pragmatic delivery mindset: moving quickly from a production problem to a safe, maintainable solution, and delivering measurable improvements in days or weeks where appropriate.