Senior Java Engineer: SRE chez Ig

Job Title

Job Description

So, who are we?

Hello, we’re IG Group. We are an FTSE250 FinTech company who run mobile, web and desktop platforms that help our clients trade stocks & shares, leveraged products, Futures & Options and Crypto.

We are ambitious. Over 340,000 people already use our platforms. We’re global with offices in 18 countries and products in 16 regions. We’re hungry to move faster, ship better product for our customers and grow our user base. We believe in high autonomy, and we want people who are looking to do things differently in order to create better experiences for our customers.

We work in cross-functional teams and are laser-focused on increasing the number of active clients we serve to drive sustainable growth.

Your team

The SRE Team comprises highly skilled software engineers dedicated to embedding performance and reliability into IG's trading platform. You'll work with cutting-edge distributed systems handling high-throughput, low-latency trading operations that demand zero downtime.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you'll champion reliability patterns, performance optimisation, and operational excellence across our trading platform infrastructure.

Your role in the Team’s Success

As a Senior SRE, you'll balance your passion for both software development and reliability engineering, applying engineering discipline to solve operational challenges at scale. You'll collaborate closely with development teams as a trusted advisor, influencing system design, establishing reliability standards, and driving quality improvements across the platform. Your role dynamically shifts between hands-on coding—building tools, automation, and infrastructure—and incident response, performance optimisation, and operational excellence.

What you’ll do

System Reliability & Performance

• Implement comprehensive monitoring and observability using OpenTelemetry standards

• Identify single points of failure in distributed systems

• Analyse system performance across OS and network layers, identifying resource utilisation patterns and bottlenecks to optimise efficiency

• Define and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for critical trading services

Technical Leadership

• Partner with development teams on system design, capacity planning, and architectural reviews

• Provide technical guidance and hands-on support to help development teams transition their applications from traditional deployment models to containerised infrastructure.

• Lead incident response efforts and conduct blameless postmortems

Infrastructure & Messaging

• Optimise message-driven systems by ensuring reliable event streaming and asynchronous communication patterns

• Scale systems through automation and infrastructure-as-code practices

Software Development Fundamentals

• Write clean, maintainable code following industry best practices and design patterns

• Apply software engineering best practices, including version control, code reviews, and testing strategies

What you’ll need for this role

Essential Technical Skills

• Strong Java development experience with a deep understanding of JVM internals and performance tuning

• Hands-on expertise with message brokers (ActiveMQ, Kafka or similar) in production environments

• Proven experience with containerization and orchestration (Nomad would be an advantage)

• Practical knowledge of OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing concepts

• Solid understanding of reliability patterns, circuit breakers, and fault tolerance

Experience Requirements

• Experience in high-throughput, low-latency production environments

• Track record of improving system reliability and performance at scale

• Experience with continuous delivery and DevOps practices

• Strong troubleshooting skills in distributed systems

• Background in financial services or similar mission-critical domains (preferred)

Core Competencies

• Systems thinking approach to problem-solving

• Strong communication skills for cross-team collaboration

• Ability to balance development and operational responsibilities

• Passion for automation and eliminating toil

Number of openings