Staff Python Engineer

The Role

We're seeking a Staff Python Engineer to provide technical leadership across our technology organisation, working on high-impact challenges spanning systematic trading, quantitative research, our petabyte-scale data platform, and AI solutions.

This is a senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who sets technical direction, not just delivers against it. You will shape architecture across team boundaries, raise the engineering bar through hands-on mentorship and review, and act as a trusted technical partner to engineering leadership, researchers, and traders. You'll be given significant autonomy to identify and drive the highest-leverage technical initiatives, while remaining deeply hands-on in design and code.

Role Responsibilities

• Own architectural direction for critical systems, making build-vs-buy and long-term design decisions that span multiple teams and years, not just sprints
• Design and build scalable backend systems, APIs, and distributed compute applications that underpin trading and research infrastructure, with a focus on performance, resilience, and observability at scale
• Build and evolve high-performance data pipelines for petabyte-scale financial datasets, working across timeseries, SQL, and NoSQL databases
• Act as a technical escalation point and thought partner for engineers, researchers, and platform teams, translating ambiguous or conflicting requirements into coherent technical strategy
• Lead by example on engineering craft: set standards for testing, code review, and production readiness, and raise the bar through mentorship of engineers at all levels
• Drive cross-team technical initiatives from proposal through delivery, including proofs of concept, migrations, and platform-wide improvements
• Participate in production support rotations and contribute to incident response and postmortems for the most critical systems
• Champion the adoption of AI-assisted development tools and agentic engineering practices across the team, and help define how the organisation uses them responsibly at scale

Our Technology

You'll work in a modern, Linux-based infrastructure where Python is the primary development language, utilising the full scientific stack including pandas, numpy, scipy, and scikit-learn. A key component of our data infrastructure is ArcticDB (https://arcticdb.io/), our internally developed DataFrame database that you'll use and help evolve. We maintain a dynamic technology landscape, continuously evaluating and adopting new tools and libraries that enhance our capabilities. man.com/technology

Our Sofia Office

This role sits within our growing Sofia office, one of Man Technology's fastest-expanding engineering hubs outside London. We recently moved into a newly built, purpose-designed office in the city as part of our long-term investment in the team here. Beyond day-to-day delivery, our Sofia engineers help raise Man Group's profile as a technology employer locally - engaging with the Bulgarian tech community through university partnerships, hackathons, and local meetups.

Key Competencies

Essential

• 8+ years' professional software development experience, with deep expertise in Python or another object-oriented language and demonstrated ability to become an expert-level Python engineer quickly
• Track record of owning architecture and technical direction for systems used in production at scale, beyond the scope of a single team
• Strong academic record with coursework focused on mathematical and computing content, e.g. Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or Physics
• Deep experience with best practices for testing, monitoring, deployment, and operating mission-critical production systems
• Experience with distributed systems, orchestration, and large-scale performance optimisation
• Proficient on Linux platforms with strong command of Git and modern engineering workflows
• Deep knowledge of one or more relevant database technologies, spanning relational (e.g. Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL), NoSQL/document (e.g. MongoDB), or timeseries (e.g. ArcticDB) systems
• Demonstrated experience designing for and working with large, complex data sets, both structured and unstructured
• Proven ability to influence technical direction without formal authority, and to align stakeholders across teams with differing priorities
• Experience mentoring engineers and elevating the technical capability of a team
• Experience integrating tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or custom agentic workflows into a team's SDLC

Advantageous

• Deep understanding of the Python scientific stack (pandas, numpy, scipy, scikit-learn)
• Familiarity with related data platforms such as monitoring and metrics (e.g. Prometheus, InfluxDB), search and analytics (e.g. Elasticsearch), streaming (e.g. Kafka), or big data and distributed compute (e.g. Hadoop, Spark)
• Knowledge of modern data engineering practices including ETL tooling, distributed storage and processing, and data warehousing
• Significant contributions to open-source projects
• Experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs), including applying them to engineering workflows or products
• Experience in financial services, trading, or quantitative research environments
• Experience defining or influencing engineering standards, guilds, or communities of practice across an organisation

Why Man Group?

• Set technical direction on problems at the true cutting edge of technology and finance
• Work alongside world-class engineers, researchers, and investment professionals - and shape how they work
• Entrepreneurial, innovation-driven culture with small, agile teams and high autonomy
• Significant influence over architecture and engineering practice, without giving up hands-on technical work
• Direct impact on investment strategies managing billions in assets

Benefits 

• Modern office located in the OfficeX campus with easy access to transport and amenities.
• Hybrid working model
• Competitive compensation package
• 25 days holiday allowance
• Premium Health insurance
• Employee Assistance program
• Referral Bonus
• Additional days off for long service and volunteering
• Multisport card
• Opportunities for professional development including internal tech talks
• Conference attendance, and engagement with the open-source community