Senior Lead

Feature Lead, AI & Data Engineering

Location: New York, NY

Working Pattern: Hybrid, 3 days onsite

Employment: Full time

We are working with a large financial services organization that is continuing to grow its engineering capabilities across data and AI.

They are looking for an experienced Feature Lead who can take ownership of technically complex projects and help engineering teams deliver them into production. This is a hands-on leadership position suited to someone who is comfortable moving between technical design, software development, delivery and working with senior stakeholders.

You will work across a number of data and platform initiatives, helping teams turn requirements into practical technical solutions and making sure projects move successfully from initial design through to production.

The position still has a strong engineering component, so the team is looking for someone who enjoys writing code and solving technical problems rather than moving into a purely managerial role.

What You'll Be Doing

• Take technical ownership of projects across data, platform and AI-related engineering.
• Work closely with product and engineering teams to understand requirements and determine the best technical approach.
• Lead projects through design, development, testing and production deployment.
• Help break larger programmes of work into clear technical deliverables for engineering teams.
• Design and develop backend services and APIs using Python.
• Build systems capable of handling large volumes of data across distributed environments.
• Develop data ingestion and processing pipelines used by downstream applications and analytics platforms.
• Work with event-driven and streaming technologies to support scalable platform services.
• Contribute directly to development where required, particularly across technically important parts of the platform.
• Support engineers with technical decisions, problem solving and development best practices.
• Work with teams across engineering, data, infrastructure and testing to deliver reliable production systems.
• Help improve the performance, scalability, resilience and maintainability of existing services.

What They're Looking For

• Significant software or data engineering experience, ideally within complex enterprise environments.
• Previous experience leading technical delivery as a Lead Engineer, Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Feature Lead or similar.
• Strong hands-on Python development experience.
• Experience developing backend services using FastAPI and REST APIs.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and service-based architectures.
• Experience working with Kafka and event-driven systems.
• Knowledge of technologies such as Redis, MongoDB and relational databases.
• Experience designing and building high-volume data pipelines.
• Good understanding of cloud environments such as AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Comfortable working directly with product teams and senior stakeholders.
• Ability to provide technical direction while remaining involved in engineering and delivery.