Software Development Engineer II

Description

You will work as a hands-on full stack engineer on the Content Delivery team in the enterprise data office, with peers in that office, other groups at the company and global business partners.

The team builds and improves full stack applications and data products, including product reference data management, client-facing data tools, AI-enabled applications and automation for marketing and publishing data.

AI experience is central to the role. You will help improve the company's AI engineering capabilities, applying generative AI and automation carefully to raise engineering productivity, data quality, controls and user outcomes, while mentoring engineers.

Success means AI solutions that measurably improve client experience, business workflows or engineering productivity, and production AI services that are secure, observable, resilient, auditable and cost-effective.

Success also means reusable AI engineering patterns, evaluation practices and responsible delivery standards adopted across teams, engineers building AI skills through coaching, and valuable AI use cases moving faster from discovery to dependable production.

The company has operated for nine decades and has more than 9,000 associates across over 30 offices worldwide.

Responsibilities

• Lead full stack engineering delivery across the team.
• Work with business and product leaders to understand their workflows, spot high-value opportunities, and turn unclear needs into outcomes, acceptance criteria and technical specifications.
• Design, build and run full stack applications, APIs, data workflows and user-facing features that support the team's priorities.
• Build accessible, maintainable front-end and UI experiences that are easy to use, support and extend.
• Set a high bar for technical quality, collaboration, inclusion and continuous learning across the team.
• Use AI-enabled tools in discovery, productivity, testing, documentation, data quality and operations where they fit and are well controlled.
• Implement end-to-end retrieval-augmented generation solutions, covering parsing, ingestion, chunking, metadata, embeddings, vector storage, retrieval, reranking, context assembly and prompt management.
• Apply sound system design and distributed-systems judgement to structured and unstructured data, with attention to data quality, lineage, cataloguing and access controls.
• Deliver solutions end to end, from discovery and architecture through implementation, controlled rollout, adoption and ongoing operations.
• Define acceptance criteria early and build automated evaluation harnesses that measure correctness, groundedness, hallucination, safety, latency and task success.
• Add observability, monitoring, cost attribution, audit trails and service-level measures so teams can detect degradation, diagnose failures and prevent regressions.
• Use engineering metrics and measurable value outcomes to guide technical investment and show the impact of AI capabilities.
• Lead solution reviews and technical decisions, balancing speed, quality, risk, maintainability and business value.
• Write production code and solve hands-on problems where you add the most leverage, especially on complex designs, reusable components and production-critical issues.
• Coach and mentor engineers across AI, software, data and platform disciplines.
• Turn successful approaches into reusable services, libraries, patterns, reference architectures and playbooks for the wider organisation.
• Build strong partnerships across global teams and time zones, influencing outcomes.

Requirements

• Substantial experience leading complex software, platform, cloud, data or AI engineering initiatives, including helping build or scale a capability from an early stage.
• Demonstrable hands-on engineering depth, with the ability to write production code, lead technical design and challenge architecture constructively.
• Hands-on experience designing, building and shipping software and AI or machine-learning solutions for real business problems.
• Practical knowledge of prompt engineering, retrieval architectures, agent development and evaluation methods for generative AI systems.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including APIs, system design, distributed-systems concepts, cloud-native development, testing, CI/CD and production operations.
• Strong front-end and UI development experience, building responsive, accessible, user-centred interfaces with modern web frameworks and design-system patterns.
• Experience integrating applications with enterprise data platforms and working across structured and unstructured data, metadata, semantic or context layers and data-quality controls.
• A track record of influencing senior technology and business stakeholders and translating between business outcomes and technical decisions.
• Systems thinking and high agency, with the judgement to handle ambiguity and make pragmatic trade-offs between scope, speed, risk, cost and quality.
• Excellent written and spoken communication, able to explain complex topics to technical and non-technical audiences.
• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• You operate with urgency, ownership, humility and strong collaboration.
• You move easily between strategic context, architectural decisions and detailed implementation.
• You hold high standards for code quality, testing, clarity, security and reliability, and judge which standards matter most in each context.
• You challenge constructively, propose better alternatives and protect quality and team capacity when it counts.
• You keep up with changes in models, tooling and engineering practice, and help others adapt.
• You are motivated by meaningful impact, strong engineering outcomes and the growth of the people around you.
• Preferred: experience in financial services or another highly regulated enterprise environment.
• Preferred: experience with public cloud and modern data or AI platforms, such as AWS, Azure AI or Databricks.
• Preferred: experience designing and delivering full stack applications across front-end, API, service and data layers, understanding how user experience, business logic and data quality fit together.
• Preferred: strong hands-on experience with modern front-end and UI development, including component-based frameworks, responsive design, accessibility, usability and enterprise design standards.
• Preferred: experience building reliable backend services, APIs and integrations, including authentication, authorisation, observability, testing, CI/CD and secure production support.
• Preferred: experience adding AI-enabled capabilities, automation or intelligent user experiences to existing applications, with sound engineering judgement, controls and maintainability practices.
• Preferred: experience mentoring senior engineers, setting technical standards and influencing engineering practice across organisational boundaries.

Conditions

The right to work in the UK and the ability to work from London on a hybrid basis.

Openness to travel and to collaborate across time zones, particularly with US teams.

Performance is reviewed annually, and compensation is designed to reward the value you provide.

Temporary positions in the United States are excluded from the compensation and benefit plans described here.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and its policies prohibit unlawful discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics, including citizenship status, under federal, state and local law.

Benefits

• A highly competitive base salary, subject to plan guidelines, restrictions and vesting requirements.
• An individual annual performance bonus, plus an annual profitability bonus.
• A retirement plan where the company contributes 15% of your eligible earnings, factoring in salary and variable pay including bonuses.
• Generous time-away and health benefits from day one, with the opportunity for flexible work options.
• 2-for-1 matching gifts for your charitable contributions, and the opportunity to secure annual grants for organisations you care about.
• On-demand professional development resources to hone existing skills and learn new ones.