Head of UI and UX Platform Engineering at MarketAxess

The Role 

We are seeking a hands-on Principal engineer/architect to lead our UI/UX platform team who has a passion and expertise for front-end technologies and React ecosystems. The ideal candidate has demonstrated experience architecting, building, and operating highly scalable, available, and fault-tolerant trading systems across various technologies. You care about the Platform's business processes, data, application, and technical architecture components, which are Hybrid Cloud in our data centers and Public Cloud providers (e.g., AWS). As a full-stack engineer, you are excited to work with a tech stack that spans React, Typescript, Node, GraphQL, Kafka, Mongo Atlas, and more. You are a thought leader, ideally actively contributing externally and in the open-source space.

You should be passionate about technology, architecture, software engineering, data, quality, and innovatively addressing business problems. You will work with the team to collaborate on software solutions and architecture and ensure exceptional software engineering practices, quality, and good documentation. It's essential to be willing to take on new skills to meet the shifting demands of accelerating our modernization efforts to the public cloud and Kubernetes world.

Feedback from your users should be something that you look forward to, as you will work closely with the Product and Engineering team users to incorporate their needs into the teams roadmap and use it as a measure of success using OKR’s. A critical success factor is being viewed as a trusted partner and collaborator, including business and technology stakeholders.

We embrace a culture of collaboration and experimentation while striving to encourage all team members to focus on continuous improvement and learning. We openly welcome diverse perspectives and people who are not afraid to challenge assumptions and prior ways of working. Otherwise, how do we innovate, learn, and grow as a team and individuals?  

How You'll Help Take Us There

• Partner with product and engineering leadership on the creation of roadmaps and building out the UI platform that serves as the foundation of all MKTX UI Apps.
• Collaborate with Platform Leadership (Cloud Platform, Data Platform, Engineering Enablement) to build out a standardized development pipeline across the firm.
• Define and implement a wide range of visual and non-visual Platform Components, including Design System, widgets, Auth, Persistence, Observability, ViewServer, Microfrontend architecture, ...etc.
• Provide technical vision, drive strategy around solutions, solve complex problems, and act as the technical owner across strategic efforts involving the UI/UX platform, Cloud, streaming, machine-learning and more.
• Provide the team with thought leadership to promote re-use and develop consistent, resilient, scalable patterns.
• Provide regular Knowledge Sharing Sessions to UI Teams, manage training materials and oversee internal Tech Community channels.
• Establish new standards and best practices – promote Open Source development practices, including RFC-s and ADR-s for platform-level technical decisions.
• Evaluate innovative technologies and participate in decision-making while aligning with our reference architectures, maintainability, and cost of ownership. 
• Ensure technology decisions align with enterprise standards and strategy.
• Evaluate and recommend technology and frameworks for flexibility, long-term viability, and time to market.
• Promote and implement modern, container-based end-to-end development workflows, incl. DevContainers, TestContainers, containerized builds, K8S deployment, ...etc.
• Collaborating with department architects, seeing opportunities to refactor business processes, improve customer experience, or perform capability rationalization.
• Help to build a high-performance team through staff development, recruiting, and retention to support growing business needs.  
• Mentor software engineers on the team, and through code reviews, ensure that all work meets team and industry standards.
• Communicate company and departmental vision, expectations, goals, and deadlines, and motivate your team through inspirational leadership.  

UX Design

• Leading design strategy and vision for MarketAxess products, ensuring they're relevant, useful, and delightful.
• Overseeing the design process from concept to implementation, fostering collaboration between design, engineering, and product teams.
• Developing scalable design systems that enable consistent, high-quality experiences across all touchpoints.
• Championing user-centered design principles and advocate for customer needs in all product decisions.
• Staying at the forefront of design trends, emerging technologies, and sustainability practices.
• Mentoring and developing a diverse team of designers, fostering a culture of creativity and inclusion.
• Presenting design solutions to executive leadership and influence product strategy.

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years of experience of progressive software engineering experience, with 5+ in a architecture and team leadership role and 5+ in a cloud computing environment
• 7+ years' experience working in an agile environment with distributed global teams and agile delivery tools (e.g., JIRA, Confluence)
• 5+ years of experience in UX design, interaction design
• Must have E-trading and financial services industry experience
• Prior experience leading a global team
• Proven track record leading design teams and influencing product strategy at senior levels
• Strong portfolio showcasing user-centered design solutions, with experience designing for fintech is a plus
• Advanced technical expertise and knowledge of
  • Software development with Java, web application technologies (TypeScript, React, GraphQL), event-driven, event-streaming and service-oriented architectures
  • Cloud-native application architecture
  • API and microservices architecture
  • Streaming and event processing architectures and platforms (e.g., Kafka)
  • Desktop interoperability (e.g., Here.io (ex. OpenFin), Interop.io (ex. Glue42 + Finsemble))
  • Structured and unstructured databases and usage patterns
  • High-speed, high-volume, high-frequency transaction processing systems
  • Real-time logging, monitoring, and resiliency approaches
  • Automated testing practices and frameworks (Playwright or Cypress)
  • Process automation approaches and tooling (e.g., DevOps and AIOps)
• Ability to articulate and document architectural decisions and roadmaps at a senior executive level
• A proponent of strong collaborative software engineering techniques and methods: agile development, continuous integration, code review or pairing, unit testing, refactoring and related approaches
• Excellent problem-solving and critical-thinking skills; demonstrated ability to employ fact-based decision-making to resolve complex problems by applying logic analysis, experience, and business knowledge
• Proven ability to build and maintain effective, trusting partnerships with product managers, architects and technical leads for individual products and applications
• Experience with OKR’s is a plus
• Strong presentation skills; written and verbal communication including the ability to influence
• BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related subject

What You Can Expect from Us   

• Central Location: based at our city offices near St Paul's
• Free Food: We provide lunch each day of the week when the employee attends the office via our vendor Feedr as well as breakfast cereals, office snacks and drinks from our free vending machines 
• Paid Time Off: 25 days annual leave entitlement plus 2 charity days
• Reward for your service: We offer a two-week bonus holiday after completing each 5 years of service 
• Core benefits: Besides competitive standard benefits package we offer private medical (PMI) for family, Cash Plan, health screenings, dental cover, 6X life assurance, critical illness cover, income protection, pension, car leasing (Tusker electronic cars), reimbursement for wellness stipend, interest free season ticket loan and a “Share Incentive” plan
• Tuition Assistance and Professional Training: Benefit from on-demand learning, boot camps, and opportunities to attend conferences 

Collaboration and innovation are integral to our success – it's how we got to where we are and how we’ll maintain and grow our competitive advantage. We believe this best happens in an office environment. Employees in Technology work in the office 2 or more days a week. This approach still allows for flexibility depending on the business function you work within but also helps us maintain a collaborative office environment long-term.