Engineering Lead

As a Principal Engineer, you won't just be writing code—you will be shaping the technical DNA of one of the UK’s leading financial institutions. This is a high-visibility career move where you’ll champion modern engineering practices, steer large-scale system designs, and mentor high-performing teams to deliver robust, cloud-native platforms powered by Java, AWS, and Kafka.

Great benefits work from London/Manchester 2 days a week. Plus bonus, pension and much more

• True Technical Influence: Drive the definition of our overarching technical strategy, product roadmaps, and cloud-ready migration plans using modern architecture.
• Industry Recognition: Act as our engineering ambassador, leading participation in major internal and industry-wide tech conferences and events.
• Modern Tech Culture: Work within a highly collaborative microservices environment leveraging real-time event streaming and cutting-edge development tooling.
• Location Flexibility: Work from our state-of-the-art hubs in Edinburgh, London, or Manchester with a balanced hybrid setup.

In this role, you will balance high-level strategic architecture with hands-on technical leadership.

• Lead & Deliver: Manage the technical delivery of one or more software engineering teams, safeguarding code quality, scalability, and performance.
• System Architecture: Convert complex functional and non-functional requirements into elegant, high-performance, and resilient system designs across AWS infrastructure.
• Build the Foundation: Design and develop reusable libraries, APIs, and real-time Kafka data pipelines to be leveraged by engineering teams across the entire bank.
• Stakeholder Partnership: Engage directly with senior stakeholders to explore, suggest, and refine appropriate technical solutions for business-critical features.
• Champion Quality: Advocate for excellent architectural principles, writing clean, robust Java code alongside unit and integration tests within automated environments.

We are looking for a seasoned engineering leader who is passionate about modern, scalable software design.

• Core Java Expertise: A strong background in Java development, with an excellent understanding of programming best practices, especially around scalability, availability, and performance.
• Cloud & AWS Infrastructure: Proven experience designing, deploying, and maintaining resilient systems within AWS cloud environments.
• Event-Driven Architecture: Deep understanding of real-time data streaming and messaging systems, with hands-on experience using Apache Kafka to decouple microservices.
• Technical Leadership: Proven experience leading software development teams, introducing and executing technical strategies from scratch. Excellent communicator and building teams.
• Modern Practices: A strong advocate for Test-Driven Development (TDD), automated test frameworks, mocking, stubbing, and API design.
• Adaptability: The ability to rapidly translate complex business requirements into technical solutions, and a proven track record of supporting and maintaining code written by other teams.