Lead Java Developer

Lead Java Developer

Cpl are partnering with a leading financial services organisation to hire a Lead Java Developer for a global technology team. This is a senior hands-on leadership role, taking technical ownership of a trading workflow platform that supports sales traders in structuring, valuing and matching interest rate deals.

You’ll lead and support a team of developers, set technical direction and drive engineering standards, while remaining actively involved in design, development, code reviews, troubleshooting and performance optimisation.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of Java developers, providing technical direction and supporting their development
• Remain hands-on with Java development, contributing directly to the design and build of key platform components
• Take technical ownership of trading workflow applications built using modern Java, including Java 25
• Lead solution design and architectural decisions, ensuring applications remain scalable, reliable and maintainable
• Drive engineering standards across code quality, testing, concurrency, performance and software design
• Review code and provide technical guidance across complex development work
• Work closely with traders, product owners, analysts and technology teams across multiple regions
• Lead technical delivery within an Agile environment and help coordinate priorities across the development team
• Oversee third-line support and take ownership of complex production issues
• Monitor, profile and tune JVM and application performance
• Improve development tooling, release processes and CI/CD pipelines
• Collaborate with Risk, Quant, DevOps and Finance teams on wider platform initiatives

Requirements

• 10+ years’ software development experience, with significant hands-on Java expertise
• Previous experience leading, mentoring or technically guiding software development teams
• Strong core Java knowledge, particularly concurrency, multi-threading, streams, lambdas and asynchronous programming
• Strong software design and architecture capability, with experience making technical decisions across complex applications
• Excellent grounding in algorithms, data structures and distributed systems
• Experience building high-performance, multi-threaded applications
• Strong experience with Spring Boot, PostgreSQL and OpenShift
• Strong test-driven development and automated testing practices
• Hands-on experience with JVM profiling, performance tuning and production debugging
• Comfortable balancing technical leadership responsibilities with day-to-day coding and delivery
• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related discipline
• Nice to have: React/TypeScript, Kafka, containerised or cloud deployments, low-latency development, or pricing/risk experience within investment banking

On offer

• Senior technical leadership position with significant ownership and influence
• Opportunity to lead a development team while remaining hands-on with modern Java
• Hybrid and flexible working
• Competitive salary (100-120K) + Bonus and benefits package
• Private medical, life and disability cover
• Wellbeing support, including counselling and coaching services
• Generous annual leave
• Learning, leadership and career development opportunities