Head of Engineering - Trading value stream

Zeal Group is a young (founded in 2018) group of companies that provide services in the fintech area, specifically in online retail trading. Today our incredible team consists of experts that previously built market leaders. So, we know what to do and how to do it and we are eager to do it in a very dynamic manner.

Currently we are looking for a Head of Engineering for Trading value stream, who can think big and is willing to build high-performing teams. This is a fantastic opportunity to realize your vision and ideas together with teams of professionals in a dynamically developing company with a start-up spirit.

Head of Engineering will have about 40 people in 4-6 self-managing cross-functional teams, priority-wise led by a Product Owner.

Teams will have a clear focus on stability, security and flexibility of their solutions. Some of the main challenges will be in building true teams with balanced set of capabilities and achieving short TTM (or TTV).

Development Technical Stack: C++, .NET, PHP

Just some of subsystems in your focus:

• Trading engine
• Pricing aggregator
• Market making
• Market connectors
• Breeches
• 3rd party plugins, e.g. from MetaTrader
• Trading (WS) and non-trading (rest|grpc) API for other areas of development (mobile, core, payments, etc.)
• Operational and risk management tools and admin panels
• Reporting tools for compliance

Responsibilities:

Leadership

• Act as a leader and play the role model in the continuous promotion of the good teamwork, engineering culture and continuous focus on creating business value
• Be a focal point for the whole organisation about the technology, engineering processes, and technical issues that are happening within the teams
• Drive the continuous focus of teams on maximizing the speed of value-delivery while optimising the benefit-cost ratio

Processes

• Ensure smooth communication about Engineering standards and policies and provide respective feedback to the upper management

• Ensure regular audit of Engineering standards and policies; contribute to Performance Evaluation by results of this audit
• Ensure establishment and continuous improvement of interactions with other tech and non-tech departments
• Foster and support optimisation of flow-efficiency, TTM (TTV)

Technology

• Support teams in providing the necessary input to Product Owner’s decisions for a continuous alignment of Product OKRs, Initiatives and Backlog Items with necessary architectural changes, paying technical debt and managing the technology risks.

• Ensure compliance with the technology standards and provide regular feedback to teams to illuminate the improvement opportunities
• Drive the architecture design to continuously improve flexibility of the product and decrease dependencies between teams
• Drive (incl. teaching and mentoring teams) the improvement of flow efficiency and time-to-value through high-quality engineering practices

People and Teams

• Manage hiring

• Salary management and career development for team members
• Conduct proficiency evaluation and facilitate multi-skilled professional development for team members
• Manage competence profiles of teams
• Mentor team members on leadership, teamwork, and collaboration

Ownership

• High-level system architecture of products
• Engineering resources of product teams

Requirements

General

• At least 5 years of experience in software development

• Experience creating scalable, reliable and secure web applications
• Experience developing and supporting systems with microservice architecture
• Leadership experience

Processes

• Experience with both trunk-based and git-flow development

• Very good understanding of Agile practices, e.g. XP, ATDD, DoD – able to mentor others about this.
• Experience in improving flow-efficiency, TTM (time-to-market) or TTV (Time-to-value) – able to mentor others about this.
• Good understanding of Scrum and Kanban
• Experience of working with self-managing teams
• Experience of working with T-shaping (or W-shaping) - team members applying secondary skills to achieve higher adaptiveness of the team to changing demand in capacity-per-skill

Soft-skills

• Very good leadership and communication skills – able to mentor others about this.

Technical

• Experience of building CI/CD pipeline with automated quality gates, familiar with one of pipeline build server (GitLab pipelines, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, TeamCity or other)
• Excellent knowledge of C++
• Knowledge of PHP or C# is an advantage
• Excellent understanding of Object-Oriented Software Design principles
• Experience with messaging (Kafka is preferable but other messaging technologies experience are also valuable as key point if understanding of principles)
• Working experience with RDMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL or other) and NoSQL Database (Mongo or other)
• Experience with covering code with unit tests using unit test framework

Tools

• Familiar with Jira or other task tracking tool
• Familiar with Git and Git branching models
• Familiar with Linux, docker and k8s
• Understand Infrastructure as Code approach and familiar with one of IaC instruments (terraform, ansible or other)

Benefits

• Paid 21 days of holidays per year and 10 additional days for national holiday
• Training opportunities for growth and expansion of knowledge
• Ability to work remotely
• Flexible and hybrid schedule – we value work-life balance
• Referral Bonus Program