Job Description

Senior Engineer

Shift Pattern:

Standard 40 Hour Week (United Kingdom)

Scheduled Weekly Hours:

40

Corporate Grade:

C - Vice President

Reporting Line:

(UK Division) Information Technology

Location:

UK-London

Worker Type:

Permanent

About the London Metal Exchange:

The London Metal Exchange is the world centre for industrial metals trading. Most of the world’s global non-ferrous futures business is conducted on the LME’s three trading platforms totalling $18 trillion, 178 million lots and 4 billion tonnes with a market open interest high of 1.8 million lots in 2024. All trades are cleared and settled by LME Clear.

Participants can transfer or take on price risk against aluminium, copper, nickel, tin, zinc, lead, molybdenum, cobalt, lithium, steel scrap, rebar and hot-rolled coil as well as alumina, aluminium premiums and alloys.

The LME and LME Clear are HKEX Group companies.

Overall Purpose of Role

LMEsmart is the LME’s Inter-Office Trading platform, responsible for trade registration, lifecycle management, and trade matching. The primary focus of the role is to engineer resilient Inter-Office integrations and workflows that automate recovery, streamline price‑band governance, and surface real‑time matching performance—reducing manual effort, improving compliance, and strengthening Inter‑Office market oversight.

Develop the automation of test tooling and framework development for the Inter-Office Trading platform—onboarding vendor tools, analysing requirements, developing, deploying and documenting solutions. Execute and evolve the automated test suite with actionable MI/reporting; refining a robust automation foundation that improves efficiency and delivery; communicate key insights to IT and Business stakeholders; and manage the relevant test environments so application codebases and underlying infrastructure are well understood and documented.

PERSON SPECIFICATION:

Academic and Professional Qualifications Required:

• Preferred - Bachelors or Master’s Degree (Computer Science or Related Degree, Maths or Physics also considered)

Required Knowledge and Level of Experience:

• Degree in Computer Science, IT or related disciplines.
• 5+ years’ experience in software development with Java (JVM), including performance optimisation and profiling.
• Deep understanding of cloud infrastructures, usage patterns, across at least one major cloud vendor.
• Knowledge of off‑heap data structures, including memory‑mapped file‑based data structures.
• Knowledge and experience of JVM based optimisation.
• Experience with distributed systems, data streaming (e.g., Kafka) and big‑data processing paradigms.
• Working in any of: Scrum, Agile, XP, Kanban or Lean Software Development environment.
• Software and application design and algorithm design and implementation.
• Version control with Git; understanding of DevOps principles and secure software development (DevSecOps).
• Working knowledge of data streaming standards and use‑cases; exposure to highly‑available services.
• Security aspects of software development.

Bonus for knowledge of:

• UI development using React.js.
• Scripting languages, preferably Python.
• NoSQL or distributed databases (e.g., Redis, Couchbase)
• Automation/configuration management (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
• Containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Public cloud (e.g., AWS) and IaC (e.g., CloudFormation).

Skills set and Core Competencies Required for Role:

• Highly proficient in Java; able to build high‑throughput, low‑latency services.
• Understanding of containers and Kubernetes; ability to implement complex network topologies in cloud like environments.
• Ability to scale applications to handle high‑frequency market data.
• Must be able to communicate clearly and constructively with wide range of audiences in writing or in speech
• Be able to make decisions and have action-oriented attitude.
• Establishes and maintains constructive and collaborative relationships with all business areas.
• Proactive planning, pragmatic judgement and attention to detail.

Personal Qualities:

• Calm under pressure with changing priorities; resolves issues innovatively.
• Dynamic, self‑motivated, accountable and proactive; takes pride in team deliverables.
• Strong interpersonal skills; able to mentor and support colleagues.

The LME is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. In recruiting for our teams, we welcome the unique contributions that you can bring in terms of education, ethnicity, race, sex, gender identity, expression and reassignment, nation of origin, age, languages spoken, colour, religion, disability, sexual orientation and beliefs. In doing so, we want every LME employee to feel our commitment to showing respect for all and encouraging open collaboration and communication.