Lead Software Engineer - Core Banking Modernisation

Job Title:  Lead Software Engineer
Salary: £90,440 – £106,400
Location: Manchester
Hours:  Full time

Working Pattern: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week currently, or 40% of our time, at our Manchester office.

About us

We’re on an exciting journey to transform our Group and the way we’re shaping finance for good. We’re focusing on the future, investing in our technologies, workplaces, and colleagues to make our Group a great place for everyone. Including you!

About this opportunity

You'll be part of Core Banking in Consumer Relationships Platform working in the Next Generation Core lab. The lab is focusing on building new core banking platform that will support servicing our customers through multiple channels and will enable the bank to create new innovative products for our customers using groundbreaking cloud-based technology platform.

You'll be a Java expert that is comfortable driving the detailed design and implementation of enterprise-grade software that enable seamless integration between our wider banking ecosystem and our next generation ledger.  The core ledger technology we're using is provided by Thought Machine, that we install and manage on our own public cloud environments. 

This will be a critical hands-on leadership role within the lab engineering team, developing cloud-native and event-based integration layers, orchestration services, and platform capabilities that allow product and channel teams across the bank to integrate with our greenfield platform.

What you’ll do

• Lead the development of Java-based, cloud-native services that interface with Thought Machine Vault and serve as foundational products for the wider bank to use.

• Own the design and delivery of scalable, secure, and reusable APIs, orchestration layers, and adapters that abstract core ledger complexity.

• Guide the adoption of modern engineering practices across the team, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and secure coding standards.

• Ensure services are production-grade with appropriate telemetry, resilience, and operational tooling in place.

• Partner with infrastructure, DevOps, and SRE teams to ensure robust deployment strategies and cloud hosting patterns (e.g., containerisation, Kubernetes).

• Mentor and coach engineers within the team and contribute to the wider engineering community through technical leadership and governance.

• Hands-on designing and developing the new banking platform as well as integrating with heritage banking systems.

What you’ll need
 

You'll be able to demonstrate deep technical expertise, experience in building banking platforms, ability to work independently and to mentor junior team members including development standards and quality of code.

A must have skills:

• Technical leadership experience including establishing code quality standards, best practices and leading technical design and implementation.

• Good understanding of design patterns and build activities across the SDLC including unit testing, system testing, integration, security and performance testing.

• Relentless focus on delivering business value through sound engineering methods and principles.

• Significant experience delivering enterprise-scale systems using Java (11+), Spring Boot, and related frameworks.

• Deep understanding of microservices architecture and domain-driven design.

• Experience integrating with distributed event-based systems (e.g., Kafka), API gateways, and service meshes.

It would be great if you also had

• Experience in Cloud Applications

• Docker based container development and deployment on Kubernetes

About working for us

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms.

We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture.

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative.

And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups.

We’re disability confident. So, if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%

• An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance

• Share schemes including free shares

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping

• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Want to do amazing work, that’s interesting and makes a difference to millions of people?

Join our journey!