Synthetics Lead Developer

Join Barclays as a Synthetics Lead Developer, where you will be responsible for supporting a global Synthetic & Financing platform that manages equity swaps and related derivative products. The platform is mission‑critical, used globally across trading desks, and plays a central role in pre‑trade processing, risk capture, pricing, and lifecycle management of equity swap transactions.

• Mastery of microservices‑based (Java stack), event‑driven architectures, with the ability to design autonomous orchestration where services react to business events.
• Expertise in low‑latency engineering and protocol selection, with the ability to choose and implement the right solution for the right job (e.g., REST for user operations, Kafka or Solace for workflows, RPC for internal data fetching).
• Experience with distributed systems, including the ability to design and implement solutions where multiple service instances communicate while maintaining data integrity and managing concurrency.

• Experience integrating deep observability (distributed tracing) into distributed, asynchronous systems.
• Experience in the Markets Prime Services domain, preferably with derivatives.
• Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines.

You may be assessed on key critical skills relevant to success in this role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen, strategic thinking, digital and technology skills, as well as job‑specific technical skills.

This role is based in London.

To design, develop and improve software, utilising various engineering methodologies, that provides business, platform, and technology capabilities for our customers and colleagues.

• Development and delivery of high‑quality software solutions by using industry aligned programming languages, frameworks, and tools. Ensuring that code is scalable, maintainable, and optimised for performance.
• Cross‑functional collaboration with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define software requirements, devise solution strategies, and ensure seamless integration and alignment with business objectives.
• Collaboration with peers, participation in code reviews, and promotion of a culture of code quality and knowledge sharing.
• Staying informed of industry technology trends and innovations and actively contributing to the organisation’s technology communities to foster a culture of technical excellence and growth.
• Adherence to secure coding practices to mitigate vulnerabilities, protect sensitive data, and ensure secure software solutions.
• Implementation of effective unit testing practices to ensure proper code design, readability, and reliability.

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures.
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/ changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements.
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within their discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi‑year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete…