Lead Developer (Java)
Summary
Lead Developer (Java) at HMRC (UK Government) in Cardiff: set technical direction and architecture for scalable, secure Java services, acting as hands-on design authority guiding an engineering team through the full delivery lifecycle. Core stack includes Java, Spring Boot/Cloud, REST APIs, Kafka/RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS.
In this Lead Developer role, you will define technical direction for scalable, secure services and guide a fast-moving engineering team through the full delivery lifecycle. You’ll act as a design authority, translating business needs into robust architectures while staying hands-on to validate concepts. You’ll champion secure-by-design and resilience, ensuring high-quality software aligns with enterprise patterns. This is a chance to shape HMRC’s world-class IT and impact services serving millions of customers.
Pay / Benefits- Civil Service Pension scheme
- Flexible and Hybrid Working
- 25 days leave (rises to 30)
- Salary £58,541 - £72,711
- Moves Adjustment Payment consideration (Leeds)
- Coaching and development
- Set technical strategy and direction to support scalable, secure services
- Provide expert judgement and escalate complex technical issues
- Act as design authority ensuring alignment with Enterprise Architecture Patterns
- Oversee build/run/improve lifecycle ensuring resilience and compliance
- Provide leadership, delegate work, review approaches, and maintain quality
- Assure security compliance and embed secure-by-design principles
- Lead solution design and technical decision-making across teams
- Ensure performance, design standards, and cross-team technology choices
- Contribute to project plans with risk assessment and mitigation
- Make and record critical decisions following governance frameworks
- Detailed designs for complex, secure, resilient Java services and enterprise-scale applications
- Strong Java engineering background with capability to challenge designs
- Experience with REST APIs, Spring Boot/Cloud, Redis, Kubernetes, Docker
- Java Messaging (Kafka / RabbitMQ)
- Relational and non-relational databases (MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB)
- Knowledge of cloud-native distributed design; hosted on AWS (S3, EC2, EKS)
- Experience with microservice architectures and UML diagram techniques
- Stakeholder management and collaboration with BA, Delivery Managers, Product Managers
- Hands-on delivery experience with advanced problem-solving in complex integrations
- Proactive and self-driven
- Strategic and pragmatic
- Design-led
- Java (enterprise-scale)
- REST APIs
- Spring Boot/Cloud