Feature Data Lead

$175,000-$200,000 per annum New York, United States Permanent Feature Lead – AI & Data EngineeringLocation: New York, NY (Hybrid, 3 days onsite) Employment Type: Full-Time Industry: Financial ServicesOverviewOur financial services client is seeking a highly motivated Feature Lead to join a company that is growing their AI and Data Teams. This individual will serve as a senior technical leader, partnering closely with engineering, product, and platform teams to deliver scalable data and AI platform capabilities.This is a hands on leadership position ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex technical problems, leading engineers through delivery, and driving initiatives from initial requirements through production deployment. The successful candidate will act as a technical lead across multiple workstreams, helping guide architecture decisions, mentor engineers, and ensure successful execution of business-critical initiatives.Key ResponsibilitiesServe as a senior technical leader and trusted partner across platform engineering initiatives.Partner with Product Owners and stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.Lead feature delivery from concept through implementation and production release.Break down large initiatives into actionable workstreams and coordinate execution across engineering teams.Design and build scalable systems that process large volumes of structured and unstructured data.Develop and maintain data ingestion pipelines supporting analytics, machine learning, and AI workloads.Provide technical mentorship and guidance to engineers across multiple teams.Participate in architecture reviews, design discussions, and technical planning sessions.Drive engineering best practices around scalability, reliability, observability, performance, and security.Collaborate with platform, UI/UX, data quality, and testing teams to ensure successful end-to-end delivery.Contribute hands-on code to critical platform and application components.Required Qualifications10+ years of software engineering experience.Proven experience operating as a Technical Lead, Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Feature Lead, or similar role.Strong hands-on development experience with, Python, FastAPI and REST APIsExperience designing and building distributed systems and microservices architectures.Strong experience with Kafka, Redis, MongoDB and SQL databasesExperience building large-scale data ingestion and processing pipelines.Strong understanding of event-driven architecture patterns.Experience delivering cloud-native solutions within AWS, Azure, or GCP environments.Experience working directly with Product Owners and business stakeholders.Demonstrated ability to influence teams, mentor engineers, and drive technical execution.Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.Preferred QualificationsExperience supporting AI, machine learning, or generative AI initiatives.Experience building data platforms that support analytics and AI workloads.Exposure to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), LLM-powered systems, or AI-enabled applications.Financial Services, Capital Markets, Banking, FinTech, or Investment Management experience.Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud infrastructure services.Familiarity with observability, monitoring, and reliability engineering practices.