Senior Software Engineer - (Java / AI) Lifecycle

Description

IG has been at the centre of retail trading and investment since 1974, when we helped create the market for financial spread betting. Today, we're a FTSE100 fintech operating across five continents, serving over 700,000 clients and handling billions in transactions - built on decades of scale, trust and proof. We didn't pivot to innovation; it's how we've always operated. What that means for the people who work here is real: genuinely complex problems to solve, the technology and resources to tackle them properly, and the kind of scope that’s rare in established businesses.

Preferred

• Experience with MCP, agentic tooling, or Spec Driven Development.

• Familiarity with the Atlassian ecosystem (Jira, Confluence) and its APIs.

• Prior experience in financial services, trading platforms, or another regulated, high-reliability environment.

The Perks:

• Competitive salary

• Flexible Benefits Package on top of your salary (12%)

• Private medical cover for you and your family

• Life insurance

• Contribution to gym memberships

• 25 Days holiday, with 1 additional day off to celebrate your Birthday & 2 additional days off a year for voluntary work (28 in total)

• The option to buy or sell holiday days

• A comprehensive global and local onboarding process

• Enhanced primary (maternity), secondary (paternity), and shared parental pay and leave, as well as a range of support and benefits for parents

What you’ll do:

• Build and maintain internal tooling that embeds AI into day-to-day engineering work: coding assistants, AI-assisted test generation, deployments, and defect triage.

• Contribute to observability in the AI-assisted pipeline, so every stage shows what the tooling is doing, catching, and missing.

• Identify manual steps in coding, testing, and release that can run largely unattended, and help build the automation to get there.

• Split work into small, releasable pieces that ship continuously.

• Work closely with a product person on your product domain, so what you build is grounded in real delivery.

• Treat improving ways of working and driving AI adoption as a fundamental, ongoing part of delivering value.

• Work with the test and PM function to bring AI into the testing pipeline: exploratory test generation, defect clustering, flaky-test detection, and smarter prioritisation of what to test.

• Evaluate and help roll out LLM-based developer tools, for example Claude Code and similar, integrating them safely with our Jira, Confluence, and GitLab environments.

• Follow and help refine standards for responsible AI use in the SDLC: data handling, prompt hygiene, and guardrails around production and customer data.

• Mentor less experienced engineers on effective use of AI tooling.

• Work with security and compliance to make sure AI tooling meets IG’s regulatory and data-handling requirements.

• Track the metrics that show whether AI tooling is helping: cycle time, defect escape rate, test coverage, delivery turnaround. Iterate based on what the data shows.

What you’ll need for this role:

• Extensive background as a Software Engineer, with demonstrated technical judgement on production systems.

• Solid, hands-on expertise in Java or a comparable backend service ecosystem.

• Strong fluency in test-driven development and pair programming as working disciplines.

• Real ownership experience: you’ve designed features or systems, built them, deployed them, and supported them in production.

• A genuine appetite for aggressive automation. You get energised by removing manual steps entirely.

• Some experience evaluating or using LLM-based developer tools in a real engineering environment.