Staff Engineer - Java
London, UK (Hybrid - 3 days per week in office + occasional site visits)
Permanent
Full-time, 40 hours per week
Up to £80,000 + benefits

About the Role

We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Engineer with strong hands-on expertise across Java (17+), Spring Boot, Cloud Engineering, Automation Testing, CI/CD, and Kafka. This is both a delivery and technical-leadership position, requiring excellent engineering fundamentals combined with design/architecture experience.

You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams to build scalable, modern, cloud-native systems that support large-scale digital platforms. The role includes mentoring, setting engineering standards, and championing best practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain high-quality Back End services using Java 17+ and Spring Boot.
• Lead technical design discussions and contribute to architecture decisions.
• Implement strong automation testing practices (unit, integration, contract, performance).
• Develop cloud-native solutions on Azure or AWS using CI/CD and DevOps tooling.
• Build event-driven systems using Kafka, including schema evolution and resilient consumer patterns.
• Mentor engineers and support best practice across coding, testing, and delivery.
• Contribute to roadmap planning, technical direction, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Promote clean architecture, secure coding, observability, and engineering excellence.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Java 17+, Spring Boot, and modern Back End engineering.
• Strong automation testing experience.
• Solid experience with Kafka and event-driven architectures.
• Cloud engineering with Azure or AWS, CI/CD pipelines, containers, IaC exposure.
• Strong understanding of architecture patterns: SOLID, Clean/Hexagonal Architecture, CQRS, resilience patterns.
• Experience with DevOps principles and continuous delivery environments.
• Exposure to mentoring/coaching other engineers.
• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.

Desirable Experience

• Experience in large-scale digital platforms or complex enterprise environments.
• Test automation frameworks (Playwright, Selenium, etc.).
• Experience with NoSQL, caching (Redis), or enterprise integrations.
• Familiarity with Java-adjacent tooling or light Front End literacy (TypeScript/React).