Lead Backend Software Engineer
I'm looking for a Lead Backend Software Engineer to shape backend architecture, drive engineering excellence, and guide teams building high performance digital products used at scale. This is a hands on leadership role where you'll influence technical strategy, mentor engineers, and ensure backend systems are robust, secure, and future ready.
What you'll be doing
- Lead backend architecture - Define and evolve scalable, secure, high performance backend systems
- Set engineering standards - Champion best practices, secure coding (OWASP), and high quality delivery
- Hands on technical contribution - Support critical backend work and review complex code
- Guide teams & mentor engineers - Facilitate design discussions, code reviews, and technical decision making
- Improve tooling & CI/CD - Enhance pipelines, build processes, and operational workflows
- Drive continuous improvement - Reduce technical debt and introduce modern backend approaches
- Support compliance - Ensure systems align with standards such as ISO27001 and PCI
What we're looking for
- Strong backend engineering experience with Java (11 ) & Spring Boot
- Event driven architecture expertise - Kafka or similar
- Cloud experience - ideally AWS; Kubernetes knowledge beneficial
- Deep understanding of microservices, REST APIs & distributed systems
- Experience with SQL/NoSQL databases
- Strong CI/CD, automated testing & DevOps awareness
- Ability to influence technical direction across teams
- Comfortable communicating technical risks to non technical stakeholders
Hybrid working
London or Newcastle
- 3 month rolling contract
- Outside IR35