Lead Software Engineer

Lead Software Engineer | Python, React & AI

📍 London | Hybrid: 2 days per week in the office

💷 £120,000 – £130,000

James Adams is working with a global financial information business to recruit a Lead Software Engineer into a highly visible technology team building applications used across its core analytical operations.

This is a senior, hands-on engineering position combining technical leadership, architecture and software delivery. You’ll help shape the direction of complex enterprise applications, mentor experienced engineers and explore practical ways AI and automation can improve both software development and business workflows.

The core technology stack is Python and React, so we’re looking for someone with significant production experience across both.

What you’ll be doing

• Designing and building scalable full-stack applications using Python and React.

• Providing technical leadership across architecture, engineering standards and application design.

• Developing APIs and data-driven services supporting complex enterprise workflows.

• Working closely with Product, Engineering and business stakeholders to translate requirements into practical technical solutions.

• Mentoring engineers and helping raise standards across development teams.

• Identifying opportunities to introduce AI, automation and intelligent tooling into existing applications and workflows.

• Building proofs of concept and helping turn successful experiments into production-ready solutions.

• Improving application performance, reliability, scalability and maintainability.

• Contributing to CI/CD, cloud architecture and modern engineering practices.

What we’re looking for

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience.

• Strong commercial experience building backend applications and APIs with Python.

• Excellent React and TypeScript/JavaScript experience.

• A strong understanding of software architecture, design patterns, data structures and scalable application design.

• Experience with REST APIs, relational databases and NoSQL technologies.

• Previous experience providing technical leadership, mentoring engineers or influencing engineering strategy.

• Exposure to cloud-native engineering, CI/CD and modern software delivery practices.

You do not need to be an AI or Machine Learning Engineer.

However, we are looking for someone who understands how modern AI capabilities can be incorporated into software products. Exposure to technologies such as LLM APIs, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, RAG, AI agents or prompt engineering would therefore be highly valuable.

Experience within financial services, analytics or other complex regulated environments would also be useful, although it is not essential.

This is an opportunity to remain genuinely hands-on while operating at Lead / Principal Engineer level, influencing architecture, mentoring engineers and helping a large global organisation determine how AI can be used practically within its technology estate.