Senior Technical Practitioner - Financial Services

Job description

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.

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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.

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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.

Originally posted on Himalayas