Engineer - Java, AWS

Job Title

Engineer - Java, AWS

Job Description

So, who are we?
IG Group is a FTSE 100 fintech operating across five continents, serving over 1.4m customers and handling billions of dollars in transactions – built on scale, trust, and proof. We didn’t pivot to innovation; it’s how we’ve always operated. What that means for the people who work here is real: genuinely complex problems to solve, the technology and resources to tackle them properly, and the kind of scope that’s rare in established businesses.

The bar is high – bring a curious and forward-thinking mindset and we’ll give you the platform to define what comes next.

Join us at IG – the future gets built here.

Your Team:
Join IG’s Prime Core team, which is responsible for building the open-spec trading APIs and solutions that support institutional and retail clients, delivering secure, high-performance, low-latency solutions.

Your role in the Team’s Success:
Our team sits within the IG Prime division, serving institutional and retail businesses. The Prime Core team owns the APIs that connect IG to institutional clients, brokers and partners across global markets — onboarding client accounts, funding, and the trading and market-data platform that our largest clients depend on every trading day.

That means real-time price distribution, order and execution flow, and reference data, running continuously through the trading day. When these systems degrade, clients notice immediately — so resilience, correctness and latency aren’t aspirations here; they’re the job. You’ll join at a genuinely interesting point: we’re building a new suite of cloud-native trading APIs.

What you’ll do:

• Write production Java that other people have to maintain: tested, readable, and honest about its edge cases.
• Work in a spec-driven, AI-assisted development workflow — specifying intent clearly, using AI tooling to move fast, and reviewing what comes back with a critical eye.
• Contribute to design discussions and technical decisions. You won’t be handed a spec and left alone; you’ll be in the room while we work out what to build.
• Deploy and run what you build in AWS, and learn how the cloud behaves when things go wrong.
• Investigate production issues alongside more experienced engineers — working from logs, metrics, traces and JVM diagnostics to get from symptom to root cause under time pressure.
• Grow into deeper ownership of services as you build confidence in the systems.

What you’ll need:

• Experience: 3–5 years of professional Java development experience, including hands-on AWS.
• Java: solid commercial experience writing Java in a production environment — this is the core of the role, and the thing we’ll dig into most.
• JVM: a real understanding of how the JVM behaves at runtime — memory management and garbage collection, the Java memory model, and how threads actually interact rather than how we hope they do.
• Concurrency and multi-threading: working knowledge, including the ways concurrent code fails: visibility problems, contention, and bugs that only appear under load.
• JVM diagnostics: practical skills reading thread and heap dumps, reasoning about GC behaviour, profiling, and narrowing down a memory leak or a contention problem rather than restarting and hoping.
• Spring: experience with the Spring Framework, ideally Spring Boot.
• AWS: hands-on experience — you’ve deployed and debugged something real in the cloud, and you understand the services you’ve used rather than just the commands you ran.
• AI coding tools: practical experience using them as part of your normal workflow, and the judgement to know when their output is wrong. We care much more about how critically you evaluate AI-generated code than how much of it you produce.
• Linux: comfort on Linux, including basic shell scripting.
• Curiosity: when something doesn’t add up, and the persistence to keep digging rather than working around it.
• Willingness to ask questions early and often. In a domain this specific, the engineers who learn fastest are the ones who ask.

The perks:
It really is more than a job. We think like a start-up, but we deliver like a FTSE 100 — so the bar is high, and we won’t pretend otherwise. We’ll recognise your talent and make sure that you can still have a life – at work, and outside of it. Networks, committees, awards, sports and social clubs, mentorships, volunteering opportunities, extra time off... the list goes on.

• Matched giving for your fundraising activity
• Hybrid working model – three days a week in the office
• Performance-related bonuses
• Insurance and medical plans
• Free access to the LinkedIn Learning platform
• Contribution to gym memberships and more
• Employee Assistance Program
• Free lunch/snacks
• A day off on your birthday
• Two days’ volunteering leave per year

Number of openings

1