Principal Engineering Technical Lead

Location: Colombo, Western Province, Sri Lanka

Workplace: remote

Employment Type: full

Description

About Onyx Capital Group

Onyx Capital Group is the world’s #1 liquidity provider for energy derivatives, trading over $3.2 trillion in notional value annually. Through Onyx Commodities, the Flux Terminal, and our trading division Axis, we dominate the benchmarks that matter — Dated Brent, S2F contracts, and beyond. We are not a bank. We are not a hedge fund. We are a technology-driven market-making powerhouse at the intersection of global energy markets, data, and engineering — and we are growing fast.

Engineering at Onyx

We don’t hire passengers — we hire pilots. Every engineer here takes ownership, pushes back when the design isn’t right, and holds the bar high without being asked. We practise TDD, design for observability from day one, and treat software craftsmanship as a genuine competitive advantage. The team is small, senior, and embedded directly in the trading floor. There are no layers of abstraction between you and the business — your work has immediate, measurable impact from day one.

The Opportunity

We are establishing a Sri Lanka engineering hub to extend our global coverage and build a world-class Asia-based team. As Principal Engineering Technical Lead, you will be the founding engineering leader of this operation — reporting directly to the CTO in London and responsible for building, scaling, and technically leading a team starting at 4–5 engineers and growing to 10+ over time. This is a rare opportunity to shape an engineering culture from the ground up inside one of the most technology-intensive trading firms in the world.

Requirements

• 10–15+ years in software engineering with 3+ years in a technical leadership or engineering management role
• Proven experience building and growing engineering teams; comfortable starting hands-on with a small team of 4–5 and scaling it to 10+ over time
• Hands-on proficiency in at least one of Python, React.js, or C#; active contributor to production codebases even in a leadership capacity
• Deep command of OOP fundamentals — encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, and design patterns — applied consistently across real-world systems
• Champion of Test-Driven Development: red-green-refactor, unit, integration, and E2E testing embedded as standard practice across the team
• Architecture and system design fluency — communicating technical decisions clearly, managing debt, and balancing short-term delivery with long-term maintainability
• REST API design, versioning, error handling, and documentation; ability to define and enforce API standards team-wide
• Source control and CI/CD ownership: GitHub, Azure DevOps, or GitLab; branching strategy, code review culture, and pipeline management
• Cloud platform experience — Azure required; AWS a nice to have
• Hiring and team-building experience; able to define a hiring bar and shape culture from day one
• Proven self-starter with a strong ownership mindset — sets direction, removes blockers, and drives outcomes without waiting for instruction or escalation
• Excellent stakeholder management with remote business users and leadership — able to translate business needs into technical direction, communicate trade-offs clearly, and manage expectations proactively
• Comfortable being the primary point of contact for remote colleagues and users raising technical issues or requests — responsive, solution-oriented, and able to triage and communicate status without prompting
• Exceptional written and spoken English — must represent the Sri Lanka team confidently to senior stakeholders and the CTO across both synchronous and asynchronous communication
• Experience working with global, distributed engineering teams; comfortable navigating cross-timezone collaboration and fostering strong remote working relationships

Nice to Have

• Startup or scale-up experience — comfortable with ambiguity and building structure where little exists
• Prior experience in financial services or fintech, or a genuine interest in financial technology and capital markets — not required, but candidates who are curious about the domain tend to thrive here
• Track record of structured mentorship and developer growth — career conversations, technical coaching, not just task delegation
• Experience establishing or improving remote support workflows for distributed internal users — runbooks, escalation paths, response SLAs
• Familiarity with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Azure Monitor)

What We’re Looking For

You are the founding engineering leader of our Sri Lanka operation. You lead from the front — your team sees you in the code, not just in meetings. You set the standard, build the culture, and make the hard technical calls while growing engineers around you. You thrive in ambiguity, communicate with clarity across cultures and time zones, and take personal ownership of the quality bar. The CTO trusts you to build something exceptional.