Financial Services Technology Consulting Engineering Lead Director

FS Technology Consulting – Digital Engineering - Engineering Lead – Director - Dublin

General Information

Location: Dublin

Available for Work Visa Sponsorship: YES

Business Area: Platforms, Digital Engineering

Contract Type: Full Time – Permanent

The Team and the opportunity

EY is in a great place today. We are helping more clients, in more places, tackle more of their toughest challenges than ever before. The exceptional career experience you will have at EY will be unlike any other because of our exceptional and diverse people. We empower our people by offering the culture, the tech, the teams, the scale, the challenges, the learning, and the relationships for you to personalize and build your career.

At EY FSO Technology Consulting, you will collaborate with top-tier professionals to tackle the most intricate challenges in the financial services sector in Ireland. Our mission is to shape a progressive future for financial services in Ireland, and your expertise is the key.

As a member of our Technology Consulting Team, you will be part of dynamic group known for their exceptional performance and dedication to client service. You will have the opportunity to empower organizations to expand, innovate, and enhance their operational efficiency. Your contribution will be instrumental in our collective goal of creating a better working world.

The Engineering Lead (Director) is a hands-on senior engineering and solution architecture leader within EY FSO Technology Consulting. The role has end-to-end technical accountability for the architecture, build, deployment, operation, security, resilience, and continuous improvement of complex client platforms.

This is not solely a programme-management or governance position. The successful candidate must remain technically current and be capable of contributing directly through production-grade coding, prototyping, code and pull-request reviews, solution design, architecture decision-making, performance analysis, and diagnosis of critical production issues.

The Engineering Lead will act as the principal technical authority for assigned engagements: translating business and non-functional requirements into implementable architectures, setting engineering standards and guardrails, making, and defending technology trade-offs, and ensuring teams deliver secure, scalable, resilient, observable, and cost-effective solutions. The role will also lead the practical adoption of AI-assisted and agent-enabled engineering, with appropriate evaluation, governance, security, privacy, and human oversight.

Your key responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• Hold end-to-end technical accountability across the full engineering lifecycle: discover, design, build, test, deploy, run, support, and continuously improve.
• Remain hands-on by writing or materially contributing to production-quality code, developing prototypes and reference implementations, reviewing pull requests, debugging complex defects, and supporting critical production incidents.
• Lead engineering delivery across multiple teams, ensuring solutions meet agreed functional and non-functional requirements for security, resilience, scalability, performance, operability, accessibility, compliance, and cost.
• Set and enforce engineering standards for source control, branching, coding, automated testing, quality gates, release management, documentation, and operational readiness.
• Use measurable engineering outcomes—including deployment frequency, lead time, change-failure rate, recovery time, defect escape, reliability, and developer productivity—to drive continuous improvement.
• Intervene directly when architecture, code quality, delivery risk, or production stability falls below the required standard.

Solution Architecture and Technical Authority

• Own end-to-end solution architecture and translate business, functional, regulatory, and non-functional requirements into coherent technical designs and delivery roadmaps.
• Produce and maintain architecture diagrams, technical specifications, interface contracts, threat models, architecture decision records, and implementation guidance.
• Make authoritative technology-selection, build-versus-buy, integration, data, deployment, and operating-model decisions, clearly documenting trade-offs, and consequences.
• Lead architecture and design reviews, approve or reject material technical approaches, govern implementation conformance, and arbitrate complex decisions across engineering, security, data, operations, and enterprise architecture stakeholders.
• Design for scalability, availability, resilience, recoverability, performance, security, privacy, observability, operability, maintainability, and cloud cost efficiency.
• Own the technical-debt strategy and ensure architecture evolves pragmatically as delivery and production evidence emerges.

Platform and Cloud Engineering

• Lead the architecture, engineering, and operation of cloud-native and hybrid platforms across AWS, Azure, and enterprise environments.
• Design and implement cloud foundations including landing zones, account or subscription structures, identity and access management, networking, connectivity, policy guardrails, backup, disaster recovery, and regional resilience.
• Require Infrastructure as Code and automated configuration management, using technologies such as Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, or equivalent.
• Lead production implementation of container platforms, including Kubernetes or OpenShift workload design, Helm-based packaging, networking, ingress, secrets, autoscaling, policy enforcement, and troubleshooting.
• Establish GitOps delivery, reusable platform services, internal developer platforms, self-service capabilities, and secure paved roads that improve developer experience and reduce cognitive load.
• Apply FinOps principles through architecture choices, demand management, tagging, observability, rightsizing, and cost optimisation.

DevSecOps and Engineering Excellence

• Design and govern CI/CD and GitOps pipelines incorporating automated unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, performance, resilience, and security testing.
• Embed secure-by-design practices including threat modelling, OWASP controls, secrets and key management, software-composition analysis, dependency governance, static and dynamic security testing, software supply-chain controls, vulnerability remediation, and policy as code.
• Establish release-safety mechanisms including feature flags, progressive delivery, rollback, environment promotion, and evidence-based deployment approvals.
• Define and implement observability standards covering logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerting, service-level indicators, service-level objectives, and error budgets.
• Lead major-incident technical response, root-cause analysis, remediation tracking, runbook development, resilience testing, disaster-recovery exercises, and operational-readiness reviews.

Team Leadership Capability Development

• Lead, mentor, and develop engineering leads, architects, and senior engineers.
• Build high-performing, accountable engineering teams with a strong delivery culture.
• Support recruitment, technical interviews, succession planning, and capability development across the engineering function.

Client Engagement and Advisory

• Act as the principal technical advisor and escalation point for client stakeholders, providing clear, practical, and evidence-based guidance.
• Translate business objectives and regulatory constraints into technical options, consequences, costs, risks, and delivery recommendations.
• Present and defend architecture and engineering decisions to executive, architecture, risk, security, operations, and engineering forums.
• Partner with programme leadership while retaining independent accountability for technical integrity, engineering quality, and production readiness.

Growth and Pursuit Support

• Contribute to proposals and client opportunities through technical solution design, estimation, and delivery input.
• Provide engineering credibility in client discussions without holding primary responsibility for sales.

Technology Scope

The Engineering Lead is expected to demonstrate strong capability across:

Cloud and Platform Engineering

• Deep, implementation-level experience in AWS and/or Azure, including networking, IAM, managed services, resilience, security, and cost optimisation.
• Production experience with hybrid cloud and regulated enterprise environments.
• Hands-on expertise with Infrastructure as Code and automated configuration management.
• Production implementation and troubleshooting of Kubernetes and/or OpenShift, including Helm, GitOps, ingress, service networking, secrets, scaling, and policy controls.
• Experience designing internal developer platforms, reusable platform capabilities, and secure self-service engineering paths.

Backend and Distributed Systems

• Current hands-on proficiency in Java and Spring Boot, or equivalent enterprise backend technologies, including coding, testing, profiling, debugging, and code review.
• Deep distributed-systems design knowledge, including concurrency, consistency, availability, partitioning, caching, idempotency, messaging, event streaming, asynchronous processing, failure modes, and recovery patterns.
• Ability to design and validate capacity, scalability, latency, throughput, high-availability, disaster-recovery, and performance requirements.
• Strong API and integration design using REST, event-driven, messaging, and service-to-service patterns, including versioning, contracts, error handling, and backward compatibility.

Data Engineering and Persistence

• Relational and NoSQL data modelling, transaction design, indexing, query optimisation, and database reliability.
• Data pipelines, event streaming, schema evolution, migration, reconciliation, and integration patterns.
• Data quality, lineage, retention, privacy, security, and governance in regulated environments.

Frontend Engineering

• Hands-on understanding of TypeScript, modern JavaScript, React and/or Angular, component architecture, state management, design systems, accessibility, web security, and performance.
• Ability to define frontend architecture, engineering standards, automated testing strategies, API integration patterns, and—where appropriate—micro-frontend approaches.

Enterprise Platforms

• Experience designing, integrating, or modernising enterprise platforms such as Salesforce and their surrounding application and data ecosystems.

Security and Identity

• Secure architecture and coding practices, including threat modelling, OWASP controls, zero-trust principles, least privilege, and defence in depth.
• Enterprise identity and access patterns including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, SSO, role- and attribute-based access control, and privileged-access controls.
• Secrets, keys, certificates, mTLS, encryption, token management, and secure service-to-service communication.
• Application, cloud, container, API, dependency, and software supply-chain security controls suitable for regulated financial-services environments.

AI-Enabled Engineering

• Practical adoption of AI coding assistants and agent-enabled engineering across analysis, design, development, testing, documentation, modernisation, and operations.
• Ability to prototype and assess LLM-enabled solutions using retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, agent orchestration, evaluation frameworks, observability, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Understanding of prompt and context engineering, model selection, runtime controls, data privacy, security, quality, responsible-AI requirements, and risks arising from non-deterministic systems.
• Ability to measure the impact of AI-assisted engineering on productivity, quality, security, maintainability, and delivery outcomes rather than relying on tool adoption alone.

Skills and attributes for success

To qualify for the role, you must have

• 12+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, solution architecture, platform engineering, or closely related technical roles.
• 5+ years leading senior engineers, architects, or multi-team engineering delivery in complex enterprise environments.
• Demonstrable recent hands-on coding and technical-design experience; candidates must be able to discuss and evidence their direct contribution to production systems.
• Proven accountability for architecting and delivering at least one major cloud-native or hybrid platform from design through production operation.
• Evidence of defining and governing microservices, distributed-system, API, integration, data, security, DevSecOps, observability, resilience, and operational architectures.
• Production experience with AWS and/or Azure, Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes and/or OpenShift, CI/CD, automated testing, and modern observability tooling.
• Evidence of resolving significant scalability, performance, reliability, security, or production incidents through direct technical leadership.
• Experience modernising legacy platforms, managing technical debt, and establishing reusable reference architectures, engineering standards, accelerators, or internal platform capabilities.
• Experience in financial services industry, with the ability to design within security, resilience, privacy, audit, and compliance constraints.
• Evidence of measurable improvement in engineering outcomes such as deployment frequency, lead time, change-failure rate, recovery time, reliability, quality, cost, or developer productivity.

Essential Skills

• Deep and current technical engineering expertise, with the ability to contribute credibly at code, design, architecture, platform, security, data, delivery, and production-operation levels.
• Recent hands-on experience writing or materially contributing to production code, reviewing pull requests, building prototypes, debugging complex issues, and using modern development, testing, source-control, and delivery toolchains.
• Proven ownership of end-to-end solution architecture, including non-functional requirements, technology selection, architecture documentation, governance, and delivery conformance.
• Recognised technical authority with the judgement and confidence to approve, reject, or redirect material architecture and engineering approaches.
• Deep system-design capability across distributed systems, cloud platforms, APIs, data, security, resilience, performance, and observability.
• Proven ability to lead complex engineering programmes in large, regulated environments while remaining directly engaged in critical technical decisions.
• Strong leadership presence and the ability to coach, challenge, and elevate architects, engineering leads, and senior engineers.
• High personal accountability for technical integrity, delivery quality, production readiness, and measurable outcomes.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain complex trade-offs and recommendations to engineering, business, risk, and executive stakeholders.
• A growth mindset and demonstrable commitment to remaining current with software engineering, cloud, platform, security, data, and AI technologies.

Technical Assessment Expectations

Candidates should expect a practical assessment appropriate to the seniority of the role. This may include a system-design exercise, critique of an existing architecture, code review or improvement exercise, diagnosis of a production scenario, and discussion of documented trade-offs. The assessment will validate current hands-on capability, architectural judgement, security and reliability thinking, and the ability to communicate clearly with engineers and senior stakeholders.

What we look for

• Passionate about reaching your potential and progressing your career.
• Energetic, enthusiastic, and courageous, with an appetite for solving complex problems and working across varied challenges.
• Committed to working within a community that values integrity, respect, teamwork, and inclusion.

What working at EY offers

We offer a competitive remuneration package. Our comprehensive benefits package includes support for flexible working and career development, and with FlexEY you can select benefits that suit your needs: covering holidays, health and well-being, insurance, savings and a wide range of discounts, offers and promotions. Plus, we offer: 

• Support and coaching from some of the most engaging colleagues around. 

• Opportunities to develop new skills and progress your career. 

• The freedom and flexibility to handle your role in a way that’s right for you. 

All our employees are given a benefits package which they can tailor to suit their individual preferences. Our range of benefits include: 

• Pension
• Discounted health insurance
• Web Doctor – Free unlimited online GP consultations for you and your family
• The purchase of additional annual leave
• Hybrid Working
• Free Gym membership
• Travel Pass
• Maternity & Paternity leave
• Bike to work Scheme
• Recognition Awards
• Cash incentives for referrals
• Work Mobile
• Tech MBA paid by EY
• Wellness rooms available in some offices

EY is committed to being an inclusive employer and we are happy to consider flexible working arrangements. We strive to achieve the right balance for our people, enabling us to deliver excellent client service whilst allowing you to build your career without sacrificing your personal priorities. While our client-facing professionals can be required to travel regularly, and at times be based at client sites, our flexible working arrangements can help you to achieve a lifestyle balance. 

Career Progression

• When you join EY, you will be supported to ensure that you are enhancing your skills from day one. 

• Continuous learning, where you can develop the mindset and skills to navigate whatever comes next. 

• As you grow and develop here, you’ll discover opportunities to help customise your career journey, so that it’s as unique as you are - success is defined by you, we will provide the tools and flexibility, so you can make a meaningful impact, your way. 

• Transformative leadership, we will give you the insights, coaching and confidence to be the leader the world needs. 
• Diverse and inclusive culture, you will be embraced for who you are and empowered to use your voice to help others find theirs. 
• We have embraced Hybrid working at EY adding greater flexibility and autonomy to the roles of our employees. 

About EY

As a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services, we’re using the finance products, expertise and systems we’ve developed to build a better working world. That starts with a culture that believes in giving you the training, opportunities and creative freedom to make things better. Whenever you join, however long you stay, the exceptional EY experience lasts a lifetime.

Inclusion & Diversity

We hold a collective commitment to foster an environment where all differences are valued and respected, practices are equitable and everyone experiences a sense of belonging: Inclusion, diversity, and equity are part of who we are at EY. We believe that the highest-performing teams maximize the power of different perspectives and backgrounds. These teams are both diverse and inclusive and are willing to invite and learn from other perspectives. Our ability to include various viewpoints into our mindsets, behaviours and operations is fundamental to driving innovation, building strong relationships, and delivering the best solutions for our clients. 

We recognise the strength that comes from having a diverse workforce and building a culture where we support all our people to achieve their potential. You’ll be embraced for who you are and empowered to use your voice to help others find theirs.

As an equal opportunities’ employer, we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds. Reasonable accommodations are offered at every stage of our recruitment process. 

Are you ready to shape your future with confidence? Apply today.

To help create the best experience during the recruitment process, please describe any disability-related adjustments or accommodations you may need.

If you can confidently demonstrate that you meet the criteria above, please contact us as soon as possible.

IMPORTANT: Where Agency assistance is required, our Talent Team will engage directly with suppliers. CVs / Profiles should not be shared directly with Hiring Managers. Unsolicited CVs / Profiles supplied to EY by Recruitment Agencies will not be accepted for this role.