Vice President - Java Lead for Investment Banking Advisory Technology
About The Position
This is a Lead Software Engineering position at the Vice President level in Morgan Stanley’s Technology division, within IBD & GCM Technology and the wider Institutional Securities Technology Division. The team supports the Investment Banking and Global Capital Markets businesses. The role combines hands-on full-stack engineering—with a strong backend Java focus—and people leadership. The successful candidate will lead a group of engineers, set technical direction, and serve as a primary technology partner to business stakeholders and product owners. They will understand business workflows and pain points and translate them into pragmatic solutions that deliver measurable value. The role remains deeply hands-on: the engineer will design, build, and own core components across the stack, from Java services and APIs to user interfaces. They will contribute to architecture, mentor engineers, guide technical decisions, and own delivery from concept through production. Responsibilities also include communicating with technology product leads, promoting engineering best practices, maintaining production stability, resolving complex incidents, and using AI tools to accelerate software development with appropriate engineering judgment. Morgan Stanley describes an open environment where employees can express their views and make significant contributions. The company also states that it offers comprehensive employee benefits and perks, opportunities to move across the business, and a culture guided by client focus, integrity, exceptional ideas, diversity and inclusion, and giving back.
Requirements
- At least 10 years of relevant experience designing, building, and operating enterprise-scale applications.
- Strong hands-on Java engineering skills, including Spring Boot, concurrent programming, RESTful API design, and automated testing.
- Full-stack experience building modern web applications with JavaScript or TypeScript frameworks such as React or Angular.
- Proven experience managing or leading engineers, including setting direction, mentoring, and developing talent.
- Experience working directly with business stakeholders to gather requirements, influence strategy, and translate business needs into technical solutions.
- Strong system design and architecture skills, including knowledge of enterprise architecture patterns and experience building resilient, fault-tolerant, well-tested applications.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to adapt to business users, senior management, and detailed engineering discussions.
- Strong relational database and SQL skills, and solid Linux fundamentals.
- Genuine interest in understanding the business domain as well as the technology.
- Willingness to learn additional programming languages, such as Python, as business needs require.
Nice To Haves
- Knowledge of Investment Banking and Capital Markets workflows and products; advantageous but not required.
- Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging systems such as Kafka or MQ.
- 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.
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 components and drive analysis and design for initiatives spanning multiple teams and systems.
- Personally tackle challenging engineering problems and build scalable, resilient Java backend services and modern web front ends.
- Communicate with product leads across the technology organization about opportunities to improve current and future technology solutions.
- Promote and evolve engineering best practices, including code quality, automated testing, and CI/CD.
- 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 engineering judgment and oversight.
Benefits
- Comprehensive employee benefits and perks (specific programs are not listed).
- Opportunity to move across the business for employees who demonstrate passion and grit.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
