Senior Backend Product Engineer

About CAIS
CAIS is the pioneer in democratizing access to and education about alternative investments for independent financial advisors, empowering them to engage and transact with leading asset managers on a massive scale through a wide variety of alternative investment products and technology solutions. CAIS provides financial advisors with a broad selection of alternative investment strategies, including hedge funds, private equity, private credit, real estate, digital assets, and structured notes. CAIS also delivers industry-leading technology, operational efficiency, and world-class client service throughout the pre-trade, trade, and post-trade experience. CAIS serves over 2,500 wealth management firms that support more than 65,000 financial advisors who oversee approximately $8.5 trillion in end-client assets.
About the role
We’re looking for a Senior Backend Product Engineer to join our Capital Markets technology team in London. This is a hybrid, hands-on role: you’ll design, build and run systems across Pre-Trade, Trade and Post-Trade, covering Structured Investments, Equity IPOs, Hedging & Monetization, ETFs, and more.
We put a lot of emphasis on the “product” in product engineer. You’ll work alongside product managers and directly with the business to turn open-ended problems into working software, and the results show up in how a fast-growing company performs. AI is a big part of how we work: the team uses it throughout the development lifecycle and has already shipped several agentic features. You’ll help build the next ones.
We work in small, autonomous teams using the Kanban principles of optimizing flow and limiting WIP. The team owns its work together, from shaping the problem through to running it in production. We collaborate closely with colleagues and stakeholders in New York. Engineers own their work from shaping the problem through to running it in production. While we have access to QA expertise, we consider quality to be everyone’s responsibility, so engineers own testing too. We care about strong engineering fundamentals, especially as AI changes how we build.
You’ll mostly write Kotlin, working with Spring, Postgres, Elasticsearch and Kafka, and deploying to Kubernetes on AWS through GitHub and ArgoCD.
Why join us
Real ownership: you’ll shape problems with the business, not just pick up tickets
Visible impact: your work shows up directly in how a fast-growing business performs
Interesting domain: complex, real-world problems across the full trade lifecycle
Engineering quality: strong fundamentals and high standards
Modern codebase: we’ve moved off legacy, and our systems have been built in the last few years
Skills & Experience
Experience working as a software developer with Java or Kotlin server-side applications
Track record of turning business problems into working software, with a clear, measurable impact
Experience building and running mission-critical services in production, from CI/CD through to monitoring, alerting and incident response
Strong testing habits across unit, integration and end-to-end tests, with good judgment about what to test at each level
Strong experience with Spring (Boot, Data, Security), relational database design, REST API design, and Kafka or a similar event streaming platform
Experience working AI-first: using AI agents to build software, with an understanding of how LLMs work and good judgement about when to trust their output
Technical leadership within your team, including mentoring less experienced engineers and setting and sharing engineering standards
Clear communication, including explaining technical decisions to non-engineers
Nice to have
Financial services experience, ideally capital markets
Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, Postgres, AWS, Terraform
TypeScript and React, and/or motivation to try full stack development
Experience building AI or agentic applications