Vice President - Lead Software Engineer

Morgan Stanley•New York, NY

About The Position

Morgan Stanley is seeking a senior, hands-on Lead Software Engineer at the Vice President level to join IBD & GCM Technology within the Institutional Securities Technology Division. The team supports the Investment Banking and Global Capital Markets businesses. This position combines deep technical expertise with people leadership: leading a group of engineers, setting technical direction, and serving as a primary technology partner to business stakeholders. The engineer will work with business stakeholders and product owners to understand workflows, identify pain points, and translate business needs into pragmatic solutions. The role remains actively hands-on, designing, building, and owning core components across the stack, from Java services and APIs to user interfaces. The successful candidate will mentor engineers, guide architectural decisions, and own delivery from concept through production.

Requirements

At least 10 years of relevant experience designing, building, and operating enterprise-scale applications.
Strong hands-on Java/Python engineering skills, including Spring Boot, concurrent programming, RESTful API design, and automated testing.
Full-stack experience building modern web applications with JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks such as React or Angular.
Strong relational database and SQL skills, and solid Linux fundamentals.
Strong experience with event-driven architectures and messaging systems such as Kafka or MQ.
Proven experience managing or leading engineers, including setting direction, mentoring, and developing talent.
Track record of working directly with business stakeholders, gathering requirements, influencing strategy, and translating business needs into solutions.

Nice To Haves

Knowledge of Investment Banking and Capital Markets workflows and products.
Understanding of cloud-based platforms and distributed systems.
Understanding of authentication and authorization frameworks.
Experience with modern Java (21+) and GitHub.
Experience integrating AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude Code or Amp, into an engineering workflow.
Willingness to learn additional languages, such as Python, as business needs require.

Responsibilities

Lead, manage, and develop a group of engineers by setting priorities, providing technical mentorship, and fostering ownership, quality, and continuous improvement.
Partner with IBD and GCM business stakeholders to gather requirements, shape priorities, and lead initiatives from concept through delivery.
Lead architectural design and modernization of defined ecosystem components, and drive analysis and design for initiatives spanning multiple teams and systems.
Design, build, and own scalable, resilient backend services in Java and modern web front ends, while personally tackling challenging engineering problems.
Communicate with technology product leads about opportunities to improve existing and future technology solutions.
Promote engineering best practices, including code quality, automated testing, and CI/CD, and help evolve them across the team.
Own production system stability, lead resolution of complex incidents, and communicate clearly with business users during critical events.
Use AI tooling to accelerate the software development lifecycle while applying sound engineering judgment and oversight.