Principal Engineer

About the role

DMA Global is undertaking a major rebuild of a technology platform supporting a boutique global financial institution. You will establish the target architecture, security standards, engineering patterns and core technical foundations needed to support institutional transaction volumes. This is not a purely advisory architecture role. It is also not an engineering delivery or project-management position. You will remain close to the code and personally design and build critical platform components, infrastructure and reference implementations. You will work alongside the Engineering Delivery Lead, who remains responsible for team management, sprint planning, sequencing and delivery. The role reports directly to the CEO and has authority over architecture, security and technical design standards.

Key responsibilities

• Define and maintain the platform's target and enterprise architecture
• Establish clear boundaries between the core platform and its independent modules
• Design for role-based access, ledger and balance management, cash, payments, transactions, settlement, custody, securities and funds
• Establish integration patterns, API standards, data models and technical design standards
• Rationalise the existing technology estate and design for secure, scalable institutional transaction volumes
• Approve technical designs before development begins and prevent work from proceeding where agreed standards have not been met
• Maintain architecture and technical documentation suitable for engineers, institutional partners, auditors and external technical reviewers
• Own the platform security architecture, including identity, authentication, multi-factor authentication, role-based access control, segregation of duties and tenant isolation
• Establish standards for encryption, secrets management, secure development, logging and monitoring
• Apply threat modelling and security-by-design principles throughout the development lifecycle
• Coordinate penetration testing and lead the technical remediation of critical and high-risk findings
• Build and maintain a security evidence pack suitable for institutional partner due diligence
• Work closely with Risk and Compliance to ensure regulatory and control requirements are implemented in the platform by design
• Personally design and build foundational platform components
• Establish the core ledger and balance model, access-control framework, API gateway, event architecture and integration layer
• Build and maintain AWS infrastructure using infrastructure as code
• Establish secure continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines and environments
• Write production-quality reference code and reusable engineering patterns
• Conduct architecture, design and security code reviews
• Remain actively involved in solving the platform's most complex technical problems

About you

• More than 10 years of software engineering experience
• At least four years operating as a hands-on Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer or Architect
• Direct experience designing and building a core transactional platform involving ledgers, payments, settlement, trading, banking or custody
• Strong production coding capability, preferably in Python
• Familiarity with modern React front ends
• Deep AWS experience
• Experience with Terraform, AWS Cloud Development Kit or comparable infrastructure-as-code tooling
• Strong knowledge of containers, automated deployment pipelines and production environments
• Practical security engineering experience across identity and access management, encryption, secure development, threat modelling and audit evidence
• Experience supporting SOC 2 or ISO 27001 readiness or delivery
• The ability to produce clear, structured architecture, security and technical documentation
• Confidence explaining complex design decisions to senior executives, engineers, compliance professionals and external partner teams
• The judgement and resilience to maintain technical standards in a fast-moving delivery environment
• Experience with NPP, BECS, RTGS, SWIFT, FIX, broker APIs or other payment and financial-market integrations

About us

DMA Global is undertaking a major rebuild of a technology platform supporting a boutique global financial institution.