Vice President, Services Developer, AI Enablement

Your Team Responsibilities

MSCI is building the next generation of large‑scale, high‑performance platforms that power critical financial risk and portfolio decisions for the world’s leading institutions. These systems process massive volumes of financial data, expose real‑time analytics through service APIs, and increasingly incorporate AI‑driven capabilities to improve insight, automation, and usability.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer who combines strong hands‑on engineering with clear architectural thinking. This role is for someone who enjoys designing systems end‑to‑end, shaping technical direction, and building scalable services that must be correct, fast, and reliable — while also being excited to apply AI and intelligent automation in real production systems.

This is a senior, high‑impact role with influence across services, architecture, and engineering practices.

• Design and evolve distributed systems that process and serve high‑volume financial data with strict performance and reliability requirements.
• Own system architecture and design quality
  , ensuring solutions are scalable, fault‑tolerant, observable, and maintainable.
• Build and operate containerized services running in Kubernetes, using service‑oriented and microservices architectures.
• Collaborate with product managers, business analysts, and researchers to translate complex domain problems into clean technical designs.
• Drive technical decisions across teams—API design, data modeling, service boundaries, and integration patterns.
• Modernize systems by evolving monoliths toward service‑based architectures where appropriate.
• Implement robust automated testing (unit, functional, performance) and contribute to CI/CD pipelines.
• Participate in production support (2nd tier) with an engineering mindset focused on prevention and system resilience.
• Actively contribute to MSCI’s North Star Architecture
  —our long‑term technical vision for scalable, high‑performance risk platforms—by influencing platform standards, shared infrastructure, and system design decisions.
• Explore and integrate AI‑enabled system capabilities
  , including intelligent data processing or validation, AI‑assisted analytics workflows, automation, optimization, and decision support embedded in backend services.

What We’re Looking For

Core Strengths

• Strong experience designing and building high‑performance distributed systems
  .
• Excellent grasp of object‑oriented design
  , system decomposition, and data structures.
• Proven ability to reason about architecture
  , not just implement tickets.
• Comfort working with large datasets and performance‑sensitive systems.
• Clear, confident communication with both technical and non‑technical partners.
• A strong sense of product ownership
  — you care about outcomes, not just code.

Technical Experience

• Significant experience with Java and JVM‑based systems (Java, Scala, Akka, Spring, etc.).
• Service‑oriented / microservices architectures.
• Spring Boot
  , REST/gRPC APIs.
• Linux/Unix environments.
• Build and dependency management (Maven / Gradle).
• CI/CD pipelines and modern Dev Ops practices.
• Profiling, performance tuning, and memory management in JVM systems.
• Version control and collaborative development in globally distributed teams.

Nice to Have

• Python experience (especially for data processing or AI‑adjacent services).
• Kubernetes, Docker
  , and containerized deployments.
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred).
• Experience migrating or refactoring legacy systems.
• Familiarity with financial instruments, risk, or portfolio analytics.
• Exposure to AI/ML systems in production (you don’t need to be a data scientist).

What Makes This Role Different

• Architecture is not theoretical here—you’ll design it and build it
  .
• You’ll have room to shape how AI is applied in real backend systems at scale.
• The team values strong opinions, collaborative problem‑solving, and engineers who take responsibility for the whole system.

What we offer you

• Salary range: $155,000 - $214,000 / year plus eligible for annual bonus
• Transparent compensation schemes and comprehensive employee benefits, tailored to your location,…