Overview:
Our Banking client is seeking a highly technical, hands-on Technology Lead to act as the engineering authority across a portfolio of mission-critical Java applications supporting global transaction processing and payments platforms. This individual will drive platform performance, JVM optimisation, Spring Boot engineering standards, application resiliency, observability, and technology innovation across multiple delivery teams. The successful candidate will remain hands-on whilst providing technical leadership, architectural direction, and engineering governance across a complex enterprise estate. Whilst the applications support payments processing, prior payments or banking experience is not required. We are seeking a strong technologist with deep Java expertise, platform engineering experience, and a passion for solving large-scale engineering challenges.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own the technical health, performance, scalability, and resilience of a portfolio of business-critical Java applications.
- Act as thcleemory management, garbage collection optimisation, thread analysis, heap diagnostics, and application profiling.
- Lead the design, development, and optimisation of Spring Boot microservices, distributed systems, event-driven applications, and enterprise APIs.
- Drive engineering best practices across architecture, coding standards, observability, non-functional requirements, and software delivery.
- Partner with DevOps and SRE teams to improve CI/CD pipelines, production stability, platform reliability, and operational excellence.
- Champion modern engineering approaches including intelligent automation, AI-assisted development, operational analytics, and emerging technology adoption.
- Provide day-to-day technical leadership, mentoring engineers, performing design reviews, and guiding technical decision-making across multiple delivery teams.
- Collaborate with architecture, infrastructure, security, and business stakeholders to deliver scalable, secure, and high-performing solutions.
Must-Have Experience:
- Senior Hands-on software engineering experience with proven technical leadership responsibilities.
- Expert-level experience developing and supporting enterprise-scale applications using Java/J2EE.
- Deep expertise tuning and troubleshooting JVM-based applications in production environments, including garbage collection optimisation, heap analysis, memory management, thread analysis, performance diagnostics, and application profiling.
- Extensive experience designing, building, and supporting Spring Boot microservices within large-scale enterprise environments.
- Strong expertise in REST APIs, distributed systems, microservices architecture, and event-driven design patterns.
- Experience with messaging and streaming technologies such as Kafka, MQ, or similar.
- Strong experience with application observability, monitoring, and production diagnostics using tools such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Splunk, Grafana, ELK, or Prometheus.
- Demonstrated experience evaluating and implementing AI-powered solutions within enterprise technology environments, including engineering productivity tooling, intelligent automation, operational analytics, or GenAI/LLM use cases.
- Strong SDLC knowledge (Agile/Waterfall) alongside CI/CD, DevOps practices, automated testing, and release management.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence architecture, engineering strategy, and technical direction across multiple teams.
Nice to Have:
- Experience supporting high-volume transactional or mission-critical platforms.
- Experience deploying and supporting enterprise applications across on-premise, hybrid, and cloud-hosted environments.
- Financial services or banking experience.
- Knowledge of payments ecosystems including CHAPS, TARGET2, SWIFT, CBPR+, RTP, or ISO 20022.
- Experience with financial transformation tools such as Trace Financial Transformer, Volante, or Bottomline.
- Knowledge of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), operational resilience, and platform reliability engineering.
- Technical degree or relevant certifications in Java, Cloud, Architecture, AI/ML, or Agile delivery.
Pay: From £400.00 per day
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Chester (Cheshire)
