Manager, Software Development

Overview

Lead and manage a team of backend engineers building scalable, secure, and reliable Java-based microservices and event-driven solutions for modern banking platforms, while providing technical and people leadership.

What you'll do

• Lead and manage a team of backend engineers responsible for designing, developing, and supporting critical banking platform services.
• Provide technical direction for Java, Spring Boot, and Quarkus-based microservices.
• Translate business requirements and product objectives into scalable technical architecture and delivery plans.
• Drive architecture and design decisions across distributed backend systems.
• Define event-driven architecture patterns using Kafka, including idempotency, retries, dead-letter queues, backpressure, and error handling.
• Own integration strategies across REST and gRPC interfaces for internal and external systems.
• Guide database design, data modelling, performance optimisation, and migration strategies for PostgreSQL-compatible databases.
• Establish engineering standards for coding, testing, observability, security, documentation, and production readiness.
• Lead architecture reviews, design reviews, code reviews, and technical governance forums.
• Partner with DevOps and SRE teams to strengthen CI/CD, containerisation, infrastructure automation, and OpenShift or Kubernetes operations.
• Improve platform reliability by reducing production incidents and mean time to recovery.
• Build effective monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting practices across services.
• Own technical delivery, identify engineering risks, and ensure timely resolution of technical dependencies and blockers.
• Mentor engineering leads and individual contributors through regular coaching and technical development plans.
• Support workforce planning, hiring, onboarding, performance development, and succession planning for the engineering team.
• Promote reusable engineering patterns and automation to improve delivery speed, consistency, and quality.
• Collaborate with product, business, architecture, security, and operations stakeholders throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Lead incident troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and continuous reliability improvement.

What you'll need

• Minimum 14 years of experience in software engineering, including significant experience in technical leadership and engineering team management.
• Strong hands-on technical foundation in Java and Spring Boot-based microservices.
• Proven experience designing and delivering distributed, scalable, and production-grade backend systems.
• Strong knowledge of microservices architecture, domain-driven design, API design, and system integration.
• Hands-on expertise in Kafka and resilient event-driven architecture patterns.
• Strong experience designing and integrating REST APIs.
• Deep understanding of SQL, relational database design, performance tuning, and schema migration.
• Experience with PostgreSQL or other PostgreSQL-compatible databases.
• Strong experience with Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift.
• Experience establishing CI/CD, automated testing, observability, secure coding, and production-readiness standards.
• Strong understanding of unit, integration, API, contract, regression, and behavioural testing strategies.
• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture discussions and make technical decisions across multiple systems or engineering teams.
• Proven experience mentoring engineers, developing technical leaders, and building high-performing teams.
• Strong stakeholder-management skills with the ability to communicate technical decisions, risks, and trade-offs to business and technology leaders.
• Experience managing engineering delivery, technical dependencies, production risks, and incident resolution.
• Ability to balance people management, technical leadership, architecture, and delivery responsibilities.

Nice to have

• Experience with Quarkus and Apache Camel.
• Practical exposure to gRPC-based service communication.
• Experience within banking, payments, financial services, or another regulated industry.
• Knowledge of distributed SQL platforms and advanced database migration practices.
• Experience with Liquibase or equivalent database migration tools.
• Experience with quality and security tools such as SonarQube, SpotBugs, PMD, and Fortify.
• Knowledge of BDD frameworks such as Cucumber and container-based testing using Testcontainers.
• Experience implementing enterprise-level observability, including metrics, distributed tracing, logging, and alerting.
• Experience leading large-scale platform modernisation or cloud-native transformation programmes.
• Understanding of security, compliance, resiliency, and audit requirements within regulated technology environments.
• Experience managing geographically distributed or cross-functional engineering teams.