Staff Software Engineer

Staff Java Backend Engineer

Location: Hybrid – London

Job Type: Permanent | Full-Time

Salary: £95,000 – £110,000 + Benefits

We're partnering with a leading UK digital banking platform as they expand their engineering organisation with strategic senior hires. They're seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to play a key role in shaping and scaling the distributed systems that sit at the heart of their platform.

This is a high-impact role for an experienced engineer who enjoys solving complex architectural problems, driving technical maturity, and guiding engineering direction across multiple services and teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of backend systems built with Java 11+ & Spring Boot
• Architect distributed, event-driven systems that support high-volume transactional workloads
• Develop robust, well-typed service contracts and define API boundaries across domains
• Set technical standards around scalability, resilience, observability, testing, and automation
• Provide engineering leadership across squads, mentoring senior engineers and influencing roadmaps
• Guide system design discussions around concurrency, fault tolerance, transactional consistency, and recovery strategies
• Drive initiatives that improve performance, reliability, and platform scalability
• Work closely with product and technical leadership to align long-term architectural direction

Skills & Experience

• Extensive backend engineering experience with Java (11/17+) and Spring Boot
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architecture
• Strong experience with Kafka or equivalent message brokers
• Proven ability to reason about complex systems: idempotency, locking, consistency models, failure modes, and scaling patterns
• Experience designing system-wide architecture or leading migrations/refactors
• Strong influence skills — able to challenge ideas, improve standards, and support engineering teams
• Background working in high-scale environments (fintech, payments, ecommerce, cloud-native platforms)
• Passion for engineering excellence and driving technical direction

What's on Offer

• Modern engineering culture (automation, TDD, pairing where useful)
• Real ownership and the opportunity to influence technical direction
• Work on a platform with high scale, strong technical challenges, and significant user impact
• Supportive environment that values engineering excellence and continuous improvement

If you're interested in learning more about the role, team structure, or engineering culture, feel free to reach out for an initial conversation.