Java Lead Engineer

Salary: £40,000 - 70,000 per year

Requirements:

• Strong Kotlin experience, or significant Java experience with a willingness to learn Kotlin.
• Experience leading or acting as a senior engineer within an agile delivery team.
• Proven ability to refine and decompose work, manage dependencies, and remove technical blockers.
• Strong experience in microservices and API development.
• Experience with asynchronous messaging technologies such as Kafka or similar event-driven platforms.
• Experience in at least two or three of the following: API development, SQL/Databases, HTML/JavaScript.
• Strong technical and analytical troubleshooting skills, including a production support mindset.
• Experience with developer collaboration tools such as GitHub, Bitbucket, Jira and Confluence.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong interpersonal skills and a collaborative approach to working across engineering, testing, product and control owner teams.
• Proactive attitude with ownership of end-to-end delivery, including resolving blockers and prioritising work.

Responsibilities:

• Provide day-to-day technical leadership for our agile engineering team, supporting the overall Tech Lead to deliver outcomes at pace and with quality.
• Lead technical input into backlog refinement, breaking epics and features into well-defined user stories, clarifying acceptance criteria, identifying dependencies, and ensuring work is delivery-ready.
• Support sprint planning by shaping technical approaches, identifying spikes, and helping the team size work appropriately.
• Design, develop and implement primarily back-end features, including Kotlin/Java APIs and services, with a small element of UI work using a simple UI framework.
• Build and evolve APIs and microservices, applying consistent engineering patterns such as error handling, logging, resilience, and security-by-design.
• Contribute to architectural and design decisions alongside the Tech Lead, documenting key decisions and trade-offs where required.
• Design, build and deliver in-house solutions end-to-end, from initial ideas and requirements through development, testing, and ongoing support.
• Coach and develop team members in engineering best practices, including clean code, test-driven development, secure coding, and maintainable design.
• Drive effective peer reviews and engineering standards to ensure code quality, readability, and attention to detail.
• Work within our agile CI/CD environment, promoting automation and quality gates while delivering rapid iterations at a sustainable pace.
• Collaborate with developers, testers and the wider organisation to build, run and improve products.
• Engage proactively with customers and users to resolve issues, respond to feature requests, and reduce recurring operational challenges.

Technologies:

• API
• BitBucket
• CI/CD
• Confluence
• GitHub
• Support
• JIRA
• Java
• JavaScript
• Kafka
• Kotlin
• SQL
• Security
• Web
• microservices
• UX UI Design
• Network
• REST

More:

We are a tier 1 financial services company building the Developer Platforms, Standards and Controls platform to help control owners and development teams manage and view compliance with software development standards and controls. This is a contract role based in Sheffield, with two days per week in the office, and the work spans Kotlin and Java-based in-house web applications and APIs across multiple applications and proof-of-concepts. We offer exposure to leading IT technologies, internal training events and workshops, and in-house seminars with leading industry experts. The role sits within a collaborative agile engineering environment working closely with developers, testers, product teams and control owners.

last updated 33 week of 2026