Senior Java Software Engineer - Vice President

About the role

In the Technology division, we leverage innovation to build the connections and capabilities that power our Firm, enabling our clients and colleagues to redefine markets and shape the future of our communities. This is a Senior Software Engineering position at the Vice President level, which is part of the job family responsible for developing and maintaining software solutions that support business needs.

About the role

We're hiring a senior hands-on engineer for the Morgan Stanley Equity Swaps technology team, the platform behind a market-leading global front-office business. You'll work within a large-scale, real-time, event-driven system that processes significant volumes every day, alongside a team actively modernizing the platform rather than simply maintaining it.

This role combines deep technical expertise with technical leadership. You'll be responsible for driving the analysis, design, and delivery of complex initiatives spanning multiple systems and teams, partnering closely with business stakeholders, senior technology leaders, and engineers to translate business requirements into pragmatic technical solutions.

This is not a role where seniority means stepping away from code. You'll be expected to design, architect, and build core platform components yourself while setting technical direction, mentoring engineers, and helping the team make sound architectural decisions. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable discussing strategy and trade-offs with senior stakeholders, reviewing low-level implementation details with developers, and owning delivery from concept through production.

What you'll do in the role

• Building and evolving a multi-threaded, Linux-based, real-time Java platform handling high-throughput event flows.
• Driving analysis, design, and architecture for complex initiatives spanning multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Leading technical discussions across business, technology, and engineering teams, adapting communication to the audience while driving alignment and delivery.
• Working with an interesting tech stack: RDBMS alongside technologies like MongoDB, Kafka, IBM MQ, Hazelcast, and Snowflake.
• Getting deeply hands-on with our large sharded MongoDB cluster, with the expectation of growing into one of the team's go-to subject matter experts on its design, performance, and operational behavior.
• Becoming a technical expert on our core cashflow calculator, with the ability to explain complex financial and technical concepts clearly to both engineers and business stakeholders.
• Strengthening our test automation and deployment practices. We're steadily maturing toward greater CI/CD and are looking for engineers who want to help drive that evolution rather than someone joining a fully automated pipeline.
• Participating in L3 support for North America on a fair rotation, leading the resolution of complex incidents, driving communication during critical events, and providing technical direction under pressure.
• Actively using AI tooling (Claude, Amp, Deep Search, and others) to accelerate the SDLC while applying strong engineering judgment and oversight.

What you'll bring to the role

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong Java engineering skills, including concurrent/multi-threaded programming, Spring Boot (Core Spring), and automated testing.
• Proven technical leadership, with experience driving designs, influencing decisions, mentoring engineers, and delivering complex initiatives across teams.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to adapt between business, senior management, and detailed engineering discussions.
• Sharp problem-solving ability and a track record of owning delivery from requirements and design through production support.
• Solid understanding of event-driven architectures and messaging systems (Kafka and/or IBM MQ).
• Strong RDBMS skills (Sybase and/or DB2 preferred), including complex SQL and performance tuning.
• Unix/Linux scripting (Shell and/or Python).
• A genuine interest in understanding the business domain, not just the technology.

Desired Skills

• Experience operating or tuning large-scale sharded MongoDB clusters.
• Comfort with financial calculations and a willingness to get into the weeds of numerical correctness, not just code correctness.
• Knowledge of the Equity Derivatives business.
• Experience integrating AI-assisted development tools into a real engineering workflow.

Who Thrives Here

• Strong technical instincts and comfortable owning ambiguous, complex problems from conception through production.
• Someone who enjoys technical leadership while remaining deeply hands-on and close to the code.
• A clear communicator who can engage effectively with business users, senior technology leaders, and engineers at all levels.
• A collaborator who can influence outcomes, challenge assumptions constructively, and build alignment across teams.
• Genuine curiosity about the Equity Derivatives business and the ability to connect technical decisions to business outcomes.

What You Can Expect from Morgan Stanley

At Morgan Stanley, we raise, manage and allocate capital for our clients – helping them reach their goals. We do it in a way that’s differentiated – and we’ve done that for 90 years.

Our values - putting clients first, doing the right thing, leading with exceptional ideas, committing to diversity and inclusion, and giving back - aren’t just beliefs, they guide the decisions we make every day to do what's best for our clients, communities and more than 80,000 employees in 1,200 offices across 42 countries.

At Morgan Stanley, you’ll find an opportunity to work alongside the best and the brightest, in an environment where you are supported and empowered. Our teams are relentless collaborators and creative thinkers, fueled by their diverse backgrounds and experiences.

We are proud to support our employees and their families at every point along their work-life journey, offering some of the most attractive and comprehensive employee benefits and perks in the industry. There’s also ample opportunity to move about the business for those who show passion and grit in their work.

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Pay and benefits

Expected base pay rates for the role will be between $155,000 and $215,000 per year at the commencement of employment. However, base pay if hired will be determined on an individualized basis and is only part of the total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may also include commission earnings, incentive compensation, discretionary bonuses, other short and long-term incentive packages, and other Morgan Stanley sponsored benefit programs.

Our workforce reflects a broad cross-section of the global communities in which we operate, bringing a variety of backgrounds, talents, perspectives, and experiences.