Head of UI and UX Platform Engineering

$17,500 - $17,500/Yr

Marketaxess - New York, NY

Full-time - Senior

New York, NY

1,001-5,000 employees

Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial Investments and Related Activities

About the position

MarketAxess is on a journey to digitally transform one of the world's largest financial markets, enabling the shift from analog, phone-based trading to a fully electronic marketplace. This transformation is crucial as it makes trading fixed-income more accessible, ultimately improving transparency, efficiency, and competition in the marketplace. The role of a Principal Engineer/Architect is pivotal in this journey, as the ideal candidate will lead the UI/UX platform team with a strong focus on front-end technologies and the React ecosystem. The candidate will be responsible for architecting, building, and operating highly scalable, available, and fault-tolerant trading systems across various technologies. The position requires a deep understanding of the platform's business processes, data, application, and technical architecture components, which are hybrid cloud in our data centers and public cloud providers like AWS. As a full-stack engineer, the candidate will work with a tech stack that includes React, Typescript, Node, GraphQL, Kafka, and Mongo Atlas. The role demands a thought leader who actively contributes externally and in the open-source space. The candidate should be passionate about technology, architecture, software engineering, data, quality, and innovatively addressing business problems. Collaboration with the Product and Engineering teams is essential to incorporate user feedback into the team's roadmap, using OKRs as a measure of success. The culture at MarketAxess emphasizes collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement, welcoming diverse perspectives and encouraging team members to challenge assumptions and innovate. The Principal Engineer/Architect will partner with product and engineering leadership to create roadmaps and build out the UI platform that serves as the foundation for all MarketAxess UI applications. Responsibilities include defining and implementing a wide range of visual and non-visual platform components, providing technical vision, driving strategy around solutions, and acting as the technical owner across strategic efforts involving the UI/UX platform, cloud, streaming, and machine learning. The role also involves mentoring software engineers, establishing new standards and best practices, and promoting open-source development practices. The candidate will evaluate innovative technologies, ensure technology decisions align with enterprise standards, and help build a high-performance team through staff development and retention.

Responsibilities

• Partner with product and engineering leadership on the creation of roadmaps and building out the UI platform that serves as the foundation of all MKTX UI Apps.
• Collaborate with Platform Leadership to build out a standardized development pipeline across the firm.
• Define and implement a wide range of visual and non-visual Platform Components, including Design System, widgets, Auth, Persistence, Observability, ViewServer, Microfrontend architecture, etc.
• Provide technical vision, drive strategy around solutions, solve complex problems, and act as the technical owner across strategic efforts involving the UI/UX platform, Cloud, streaming, machine-learning and more.
• Provide the team with thought leadership to promote re-use and develop consistent, resilient, scalable patterns.
• Provide regular Knowledge Sharing Sessions to UI Teams, manage training materials and oversee internal Tech Community channels.
• Establish new standards and best practices - promote Open Source development practices, including RFC-s and ADR-s for platform-level technical decisions.
• Evaluate innovative technologies and participate in decision-making while aligning with our reference architectures, maintainability, and cost of ownership.
• Ensure technology decisions align with enterprise standards and strategy.
• Evaluate and recommend technology and frameworks for flexibility, long-term viability, and time to market.
• Promote and implement modern, container-based end-to-end development workflows, including DevContainers, TestContainers, containerized builds, K8S deployment, etc.
• Collaborate with department architects, seeing opportunities to refactor business processes, improve customer experience, or perform capability rationalization.
• Help to build a high-performance team through staff development, recruiting, and retention to support growing business needs.
• Mentor software engineers on the team, and through code reviews, ensure that all work meets team and industry standards.
• Communicate company and departmental vision, expectations, goals, and deadlines, and motivate your team through inspirational leadership.
• Lead design strategy and vision for MarketAxess products, ensuring they're relevant, useful, and delightful.
• Oversee the design process from concept to implementation, fostering collaboration between design, engineering, and product teams.
• Develop scalable design systems that enable consistent, high-quality experiences across all touchpoints.
• Champion user-centered design principles and advocate for customer needs in all product decisions.
• Stay at the forefront of design trends, emerging technologies, and sustainability practices.
• Mentor and develop a diverse team of designers, fostering a culture of creativity and inclusion.
• Present design solutions to executive leadership and influence product strategy.

Requirements

• 12+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with 5+ in an architecture and team leadership role and 5+ in a cloud computing environment.
• 7+ years' experience working in an agile environment with distributed global teams and agile delivery tools (e.g., JIRA, Confluence).
• 5+ years of experience in UX design, interaction design.
• Must have E-trading and financial services industry experience.
• Prior experience leading a global team.
• Proven track record leading design teams and influencing product strategy at senior levels.
• Strong portfolio showcasing user-centered design solutions, with experience designing for fintech is a plus.
• Advanced technical expertise and knowledge of software development with Java, web application technologies (TypeScript, React, GraphQL), event-driven, event-streaming and service-oriented architectures.
• Cloud-native application architecture.
• API and microservices architecture.
• Streaming and event processing architectures and platforms (e.g., Kafka).
• Desktop interoperability (e.g., Here.io, Interop.io).
• Structured and unstructured databases and usage patterns.
• High-speed, high-volume, high-frequency transaction processing systems.
• Real-time logging, monitoring, and resiliency approaches.
• Automated testing practices and frameworks (Playwright or Cypress).
• Process automation approaches and tooling (e.g., DevOps and AIOps).
• Ability to articulate and document architectural decisions and roadmaps at a senior executive level.
• A proponent of strong collaborative software engineering techniques and methods: agile development, continuous integration, code review or pairing, unit testing, refactoring and related approaches.
• Excellent problem-solving and critical-thinking skills; demonstrated ability to employ fact-based decision-making to resolve complex problems by applying logic analysis, experience, and business knowledge.
• Proven ability to build and maintain effective, trusting partnerships with product managers, architects and technical leads for individual products and applications.
• Experience with OKRs is a plus.
• Strong presentation skills; written and verbal communication including the ability to influence.
• BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related subject.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience designing for fintech is a plus.
• Experience with OKRs is a plus.

Benefits

• Hybrid Environment: Our employees enjoy a mix of working in the office and from home.
• Free Food: We provide free lunch for employees when they are working in the office. Plus, our offices are stocked with snacks.
• Paid Time Off: Competitive PTO package including vacation and personal days, sick leave and charity days.
• Generous Parental Leave: Up to 20 weeks fully paid leave.
• 401(k): Dollar-for-dollar employer match up to $17,500.
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan: Employees can purchase MarketAxess common stock at a discount.
• Wellness Stipend: We provide employees with up to $1K annually towards gym memberships, home office equipment and more.
• Onsite Healthcare: We offer convenient access to world-class care through Mount Sinai at our Hudson Yards location.
• Tuition Assistance and Professional Development: Benefit from live and on-demand learning, role-specific training, employee-led Lunch and Learns and guest speakers.
• Core benefits: Highly competitive medical, dental, and vision programs.