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 What’s in it for you? • 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. Your Mission (What you’ll do)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. What you’ll bring to the table (The skills we need)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.