Job Description
Role
The Software Engineering Lead (Python) is an Associate Director–level role within StarCompliance’s R&D Engineering organisation, with accountability for the technical leadership and delivery of StarCompliance’s crypto compliance product.
The crypto compliance product is a strategically important capability within StarCompliance’s emerging products portfolio, operating in a fast-evolving regulatory, technical, and market landscape. While StarCompliance broadly shares a common technology stack, this product is distinct in its primary use of Python, which this role provides leadership over.
This role holds end-to-end accountability for the technical health, delivery outcomes, and operational sustainability of the crypto product, including architecture, engineering practices, delivery processes, and team capability.
The Software Engineering Lead leads a small, highly skilled engineering team (typically 3–5 Software Engineers) and is accountable for how the team operates, how technical decisions align with business and regulatory objectives, and how engineering capability is built and sustained over time.
While the role requires sufficient technical depth to review designs, guide implementation decisions, and challenge approaches, success is measured through team outcomes and system quality rather than individual code contribution.
The role works closely with Product Management, Architecture, Security, Platform Engineering, and other senior technical leaders to ensure the crypto product evolves in a way that is secure, scalable, compliant, and aligned with StarCompliance’s broader SaaS strategy.
Responsibilities
- Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Own and guide the technical architecture of the crypto compliance product, ensuring it meets StarCompliance standards for security, scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
- Act as the primary decision-maker for technical trade-offs within the product, escalating only where decisions materially impact broader platform or organisational strategy
- Balance short-term delivery needs with long-term technical sustainability.
- Provide clear technical direction on system design, service boundaries, APIs, data models, and integration patterns
- Ensure alignment with StarCompliance architectural principles, cloud standards, and security requirements.
- Serve as the senior technical point of contact for the crypto product
Team Leadership & Enablement
- Line-manage and lead a small development team (3–5 Software Engineers), taking accountability for team performance, delivery outcomes, and technical quality.
- Own resource deployment within the team, balancing delivery commitments, technical investment, and people development.
- Create an environment where engineers are enabled to perform at their best through clear priorities and removal of impediments.
- Coach, mentor, and develop engineers through regular feedback, guidance, and development planning.
- Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and high-trust team culture focused on ownership and continuous improvement
Delivery & Continuous Improvement
- Take accountability for the end-to-end delivery of engineering outcomes for the crypto product.
- Ensure applications and services are developed to a high standard and are fit for purpose in a regulated environment.
- Drive solutions to complex technical and delivery problems, coordinating across teams where required.
- Partner with Product Management to shape feasible technical approaches, delivery plans, and sequencing.
- Champion modern software engineering practices including testing, documentation, and operational readiness.
- Promote security-by-design and embed secure engineering practices.
- Represent the crypto product’s technical interests in cross-engineering and architecture forums.
- Identify and implement opportunities to improve processes, reduce risk, and increase team effectiveness
Skills and Experience
- Leadership & Management
- Proven experience leading and managing small engineering teams with accountability for outcomes.
- Strong interpersonal and communication skills, able to work effectively with engineers, product managers, and senior stakeholders.
- Experience guiding architectural decisions and setting technical direction.
- Demonstrated coaching and mentoring capability.
- Ability to align technical decisions with business and regulatory objectives.
- Experience building sustainable, high-performing engineering teams
- Technical
- Strong understanding of Python and modern software engineering practices.
- Experience with enterprise-scale, service-oriented or microservices-based systems.
- Solid grasp of object-oriented design and system architecture principles.
- Experience overseeing delivery of large or complex software initiatives.
- Knowledge of cloud platforms and architectures (AWS, Azure preferred).
- Experience with API-based integrations.
- Strong security mindset, particularly in regulated environments.
- Ability to analyse requirements and translate them into clear technical direction.
- Comfortable evaluating and adopting new technologies where appropriate
Desirable
- Experience or interest in crypto or digital assets.
- Hands-on Python experience in production environments.
- Exposure to Flask, MongoDB, Kafka, TypeScript, and AWS
- Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, SQL Server).
- Experience with statically typed Python codebases.
- Background in financial services (traditional finance or crypto).
- Familiarity with Domain-Driven Design (DDD).
- Experience with ORM frameworks (e.g. SQLAlchemy, Django ORM)
Minimum Qualifications
- Proven experience leading or managing software engineering teams.
- Demonstrable experience providing technical leadership for complex, production-grade systems.
- Strong working knowledge of Python and modern backend development practices.
- Experience designing, delivering, or overseeing service-oriented or API-driven systems.
- Experience operating in cloud-based environments (AWS or equivalent).
- Strong understanding of secure software development practices.
- Experience working in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments.
- Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Eligibility to pass StarCompliance pre-employment screening.
Integrity and Ethics
- All StarCompliance employees are expected to commit to a high standard of personal integrity and carry out their responsibilities in an ethical manner
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
