Lead Engineer - Commodities

At Kpler, we are dedicated to helping our clients navigate complex markets with ease. By simplifying global trade information and providing valuable insights, we empower organisations to make informed decisions in commodities, energy, and maritime sectors.

Since our founding in 2014, we have focused on delivering top-tier intelligence through user-friendly platforms. Our team of over 850 experts from 69 countries works tirelessly to transform intricate data into actionable strategies, ensuring our clients stay ahead in a dynamic market landscape. Join us to leverage cutting-edge innovation for impactful results and experience unparalleled support on your journey to success.

The Commodities Tribe builds the systems that turn fragmented maritime, cargo and market data into a real-time view of how commodities are moving around the world. Our platforms process complex and often incomplete data at scale, powering products, APIs and analytical workflows used by customers and internal experts to understand global trade.

As an Lead Engineer, you will lead teams at the centre of this domain as we modernise a business-critical platform and move towards a more modular, scalable and AI-native architecture. You will be responsible for building a high-performing and sustainable engineering environment: developing people, improving delivery, strengthening operational ownership and enabling Technical Leads and senior engineers to make strong technical decisions. The role is well suited to either an existing Engineering Manager or an experienced Technical Lead or senior engineer ready to take their first formal step into management.

Your mission is to

• Guide the teams through the platform transformation, helping engineers understand, influence and adopt the new direction.
• Partner with Product and domain stakeholders to shape the roadmap around customer value, data quality and business outcomes.
• Develop Technical Leads and senior engineers, delegating decisions to the people with the strongest context while keeping accountability clear.
• Maintain enough technical depth to lead credibly, challenge assumptions and support sound decision-making without becoming the default technical owner.
• Set clear goals, milestones and delivery rhythms with the teams, balancing roadmap commitments with technical debt and platform health.
• Build strong end-to-end operational ownership, including on-call, runbooks, incident response and follow-up actions.
• Improve reliability and observability across the cargo data platform, addressing gaps in monitoring, alerting and data integrity.
• Lead significant incidents affecting the domain and ensure contributing factors are understood and acted on.
• Shape and grow your team through effective hiring, capability planning and interviewer development.
• Develop and retain engineers through coaching, actionable feedback, meaningful goals and fair performance management.

You could be a match if you have

• Experience leading a software engineering team, whether as an Engineering Manager, Technical Lead, acting manager or senior engineer with meaningful responsibility for delivery and the development of others.
• Strong technical foundations in backend, data or distributed systems, with enough depth to review designs, challenge assumptions and coach engineers through complex technical decisions.
• Ability to work effectively with Product, engineering and domain stakeholders to translate business priorities into clear technical and delivery outcomes.
• Experience contributing to the operation of production systems, including on-call practices, incident response, monitoring and follow-up improvements.
• A strong belief in end-to-end engineering ownership, including the reliability, maintainability and operational impact of the systems a team builds.
• A track record of setting clear goals, coordinating delivery and creating accountability within an engineering team.
• Experience supporting the growth and performance of engineers through regular feedback, development goals and constructive handling of difficult situations.
• Some involvement in hiring or technical interviewing, with the ability to assess candidates fairly and provide clear, evidence-based feedback.

Desirable:

• Experience leading or contributing to the migration, modernisation or re-architecture of a long-lived production system while maintaining continuity for its users.
• Experience with data-intensive, event-driven or ML-adjacent systems, such as data pipelines, Kafka, optimisation engines or systems where data and model correctness are central to the product.
• Familiarity with Python and one or more JVM-based technologies, such as Java or Scala, or experience working effectively in a polyglot environment.
• Experience partnering with Product at roadmap level, helping shape priorities rather than working solely from predefined requirements.
• Experience developing Technical Leads or senior engineers and delegating technical ownership effectively.
• Exposure to domains such as commodities, energy, logistics or financial markets, where data quality, timeliness and operational reliability are particularly important.

We are a dynamic company dedicated to nurturing connections and innovating solutions to tackle market challenges head-on. If you thrive on customer satisfaction and turning ideas into reality, then you’ve found your ideal destination. Are you ready to embark on this exciting journey with us?

We make things happen

We act decisively and with purpose, going the extra mile.

We build together

We foster relationships and develop creative solutions to address market challenges.

We are here to help

We are accessible and supportive to colleagues and clients with a friendly approach.

Our People Pledge

Don’t meet every single requirement? Research shows that women and people of color are less likely than others to apply if they feel like they don’t match 100% of the job requirements. Don’t let the confidence gap stand in your way, we’d love to hear from you! We understand that experience comes in many different forms and are dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team.

Kpler is committed to providing a fair, inclusive and diverse work-environment. We believe that different perspectives lead to better ideas, and better ideas allow us to better understand the needs and interests of our diverse, global community. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives and are an equal opportunity employer.

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