Principal Software Engineer, Platform, BPL
As an Engineering Lead in our Chief Product and Technology Office (CPTO), you’ll shape the architecture of tomorrow and mentor talented engineers, crafting elegant solutions for complex problems to create solutions that millions depend on.
In this role you'll be at the forefront of innovation, designing and building highly resilient, scalable distributed services that power critical business operations.
You'll work with modern JVM languages (primarily Kotlin), cloud-native technologies, and contemporary frontend frameworks.
What you’ll be building:
World-Class Distributed Systems - Design and implement highly performant, fault-tolerant distributed services that handle massive scale with grace. You'll architect systems that are built to survive failures, scale elastically, and deliver lightning-fast response times.
Domain-Driven Excellence - Apply domain modelling principles to create clean, maintainable codebases that accurately represent complex business logic. Your work will set the standard for engineering excellence.
Production-Grade Quality - Champion comprehensive testing strategies—from unit tests to performance testing to chaos engineering. You'll ensure every service is battle-tested before it sees production traffic.
Full-Stack Impact - Build responsive web UIs that delight users while maintaining the performance and reliability standards expected of enterprise-grade applications.
Ownership -Live the "you build it, you run it" philosophy. You'll participate in on-call rotations (shared across the team), giving you direct insight into how your systems perform in the wild and driving continuous improvement.
Security First - Embed security into every layer of your solutions, ensuring customer data is protected with industry-leading practices and zero-trust principles.
AI-Augmented Development -Leverage AI-powered tools to accelerate development while ensuring every line of code—whether human or AI-generated—meets our exacting production standards.
Successful candidates will have a storied history with extensive experience building complex, scalable systems. You’ve seen things break at scale, and you know how to prevent it.
Essential skills include:
- Experience gained in a Payment Acquiring, Fintech or Payment SaaS business.
- Product thinking approach - you treat the platform as a product, with fellow engineers as your customers
- Sophisticated communication - demonstrating the ability to bring both technical and non-technical stakeholders on the journey with us, e.g. explaining complex technical trade-offs to those who might not know what a "service mesh" is
- A polyglot mindset with expertise of at least two languages and "right tool for the job" philosophy
- JVM Mastery – Deep expertise in at least one JVM language (we primarily use Kotlin, but strong Java, Scala, or Clojure experience translates beautifully)
- Cloud-Native Mindset – Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and understanding of cloud design patterns
- Messaging & Events – Solid grasp of messaging technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, NATS) and event-driven architecture patterns
- Data Layer Expertise – Experience with both SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis) databases, understanding when to use each
- API Design – Proven track record designing and implementing RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs that scale
- Rust – Experience with systems programming and performance-critical services
- AWS Mastery – Advanced AWS knowledge
- Kubernetes – Container orchestration experience with K8s, Helm, and cloud-native deployment strategies
- React – Modern frontend development skills with React, TypeScript, and state management libraries
- Observability – Experience with monitoring, logging, and tracing tools
- CI/CD Wizardry – Strong DevOps mindset with experience in automated deployment pipelines, infrastructure as code, and GitOps practices
Location:
London (1 Churchill Place and 7 Westferry Circus - new BPL office) or Northampton.
We support a hybrid working pattern with 3 days per week office-based presence expected.
Risk and Control:
You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.
About BPL:
Barclays’ payments acceptance business provides critical infrastructure to the UK economy, processing billions of pounds of payments annually for both small businesses and domestic and international corporate clients.
In April 2025, we announced a long-term partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to grow and transform the payments acceptance business by broadening the range of services offered, enhancing the experience for both existing and prospective clients. Leveraging extensive client relationships and deep experience of UK payments, we will create an environment of continuous innovation - activated by Brookfield’s global private equity expertise in payments, technology, operational transformation and corporate carve-outs - to ensure the business is strategically positioned for long-term growth.
Barclays will invest approximately £400m in the new business, the majority of which will be incurred during the first three years. Performance-linked incentives will drive greater alignment between the partners, underpinning the long-term commitment to the transformation. Barclays and Brookfield will work to create a standalone entity over time, continuing to use the Barclaycard Payments (BPL) brand and acting as the sole payments acceptance services provider to Barclays’ clients for a minimum of ten years.
For more information on our partnership with Brookfield, please visit Barclays.com.
Purpose of the role
To drive technical excellence and innovation by leading the design and implementation of robust software solutions, providing mentorship to engineering teams, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and contributing to strategic planning to ensure the delivery of high-quality solutions aligned with business objectives.
Accountabilities
- Provision of guidance and expertise to engineering teams to ensure alignment with best practices and foster a culture of technical excellence.
- Contribution to strategic planning by aligning technical decisions with business goals, anticipating future technology trends, and providing insights to optimize product roadmaps.
- Design and implementation of complex, scalable, and maintainable software solutions, considering long-term viability and business objectives.
- Mentoring and coaching to junior and mid-level engineers to foster professional growth and knowledge sharing, elevating the overall skillset and capabilities of the organization.
- Collaboration with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
- Innovation within the organization by identifying and incorporating new technologies, methodologies, and industry practices into the engineering process.
Director Expectations
- To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide..
- They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
- Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
- Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
- Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
- Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
- Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
- Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
- Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
- Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
- Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
- Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
- Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
- Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.
All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.
All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.
