Lead Developer

Overview

Markets are changing fast: 24/7 trading, crypto, event contracts and tokenized assets are going mainstream. ICE runs some of the world's largest clearing houses, and we're evolving the systems behind them for what comes next. You'll help lead that change.

 

Responsibilities

• Build: Design and ship the services that calculate positions, margin and settlement.
• Launch: Take new products, such as crypto perpetuals and event contracts, to market.
• Run: Own production systems where a wrong number moves real money.
• Lead: Set technical direction, review designs and code, and grow the team.
• Partner: Work directly with Risk, Treasury and Operations on real problems.

 

Responsibilities

• Bachelor's in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of hands-on Java, including leading or mentoring developers.
• Technical Expertise:
• Java 21: Algorithms, design patterns, multi-threading, performance tuning.
• Messaging: Kafka and Kafka Streams, JMS, Protobuf; event-driven microservices.
• Spring: Framework 6.x / Boot 3.x; REST API design (OpenAPI); Maven or Gradle.
• Data: Oracle, SQL, PL/SQL, MyBatis, JDBC, JPA; Liquibase.
• Testing: JUnit 5, Mockito, TestContainers; test-driven development.
• Containers: Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift (Pipelines, GitOps, Operators), Helm.
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo CD; GitOps workflows.
• Observability: Micrometer, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Splunk/ELK.
• Problem-solving, attention to detail, clear communication, Agile.

 

What Sets You Apart

• Domain: Futures and options, especially clearing, margin or risk.
• AI tools: Daily use of AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code) to design, build, test and refactor, with rigorous review of what they produce.
• Front end: React or Ext JS.
• Architecture: DDD, hexagonal, CQRS, Event Sourcing, Saga, distributed transactions.
• Platform: AWS/Azure/GCP, Terraform, service mesh, Redis/Hazelcast, Spring WebFlux.
• Open source: Contributions to open-source projects.

 

Why Join Us?

• Stakes: Your systems are the backstop when markets are at their most volatile.
• New markets: Build clearing for crypto and event contracts, not just maintain legacy code.
• Ownership: Own systems end to end, from design through to production.
• Modern tools: A current Java stack, with AI coding agents part of everyday work.