Lead Engineer

LDMS

Lead Engineer shaping greenfield systems at LDMS, a financial business in Cardiff. Owning technical direction and influencing engineering standards as a hands-on leader.

Posted 7/23/2026full-timeCardiff • 🇬🇧 United KingdomSenior💰 £78,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot, with a strong focus on technical direction, team capability enhancement, and delivery of complex systems. Proficient in observability, CI/CD practices, and cloud architecture, particularly on AWS.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Java ExpertiseSpring Boot ProficiencyCI/CD Pipeline ManagementObservability StandardsCloud Architecture on AWS

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

JavaSpring BootPostgreSQLCI/CDObservabilityPerformance DesignSecurity PracticesCloud Systems DesignAI Coding ToolsFull-Stack Development

Soft Skills

Excellent CommunicationTeam LeadershipDecision-MakingInfluencing StakeholdersBuilding Team Culture

Tools & Technologies

PrometheusGrafanaJenkinsKeycloakAWS S3

Industry Keywords

Technical DirectionGreenfield SystemsFinancial Software DevelopmentScalabilitySecurity-by-Design

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudGrafanaJavaJenkinsOpen SourcePostgresPrometheusReactSpringSpring BootSpringBootTypeScript

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

**Key Responsibilities**These may change with the needs of the business, but the main areas are:
**Technical Direction**
Own the long-term technical strategy for a core domain of the platform and drive the architectural work needed to get there, not just the next feature.
Produce the designs and reference architectures that other engineers build from with confidence and without rework.
Set and own the technical standards for your domain and lead Senior Engineers in applying them consistently.
Liaise with the Principal Engineers to keep your domain’s technical strategy, tooling and patterns aligned with the wider technical direction.
Anticipate scaling, resilience, security and operability risks before they become incidents and drive best practice such as observability, security-by-design and robust testing.
Track where the industry is heading and judge, proactively, what is worth bringing into our stack.
**Delivery**
Own delivery outcomes for large, complex pieces of work and keeping momentum through ambiguity and changing requirements.
Influence roadmap prioritisation based on technical risk, complexity and strategic value, not just delivery execution.
Identify systemic delivery problems and drive structural fixes, rather than working around them.
Make sound, defensible decisions with incomplete information and model the delivery discipline you expect of others.
**Impact**
Raise the technical capability of Senior Engineers working within your domain through design leadership, review and pairing.
Build standards, patterns and a culture of technical excellence that persist and compound after any single project ends.
Have visible, structural impact beyond your immediate team, influencing how other teams work or what they build.
Work with Engineering Management on department-level strategy and standards and shape the engineering hiring bar and team culture.
**Communication and Influence**
Communicate technical strategy clearly to engineers, product, and business stakeholders.
Produce written work such as design documentation, RFCs and proposals that shifts how the organisation thinks and drives alignment across teams.
Influence other teams and resolve significant disagreements through reasoning and trust, without needing to escalate.
Build an external technical profile through conferences, open source, or industry community, in ways that raise our reputation and help us attract talent.
Encourage open technical discussion and build active engineering communities across our main communication channels.
**AI and Innovation**
Trial new tools and technologies, including AI and embed the ones that help into how the team works day to day, while being honest about their limits.
Set the standards for how the team uses AI, codifying our patterns and guardrails into the tooling itself so that AI-assisted work stays consistent, secure and high quality as it scales.
Lead by example in day-to-day development with AI coding tools such as Claude, using them to move faster while holding the bar on design quality, security and maintainability.

Requirements

What you’ll need

**Essential**
Deep, hands-on expertise in Java (preferably Java 25+) with strong command of Spring Boot.
Strong relational database skills, ideally PostgreSQL, including schema design, migrations and working with data at scale.
A track record of setting technical direction for a domain or service area, with decisions that proved sound and were rarely reversed.
Experience raising the capability of a team of engineers, not just mentoring individuals, but lifting the standard of the group.
Demonstrated ability to lead technical delivery of complex, ideally greenfield systems over sustained periods.
Strong grounding in observability, setting the standard for how services are instrumented, monitored and debugged (for example Prometheus, Grafana).
A history of keeping a codebase secure and current, owning Java and dependency upgrades and vulnerability scanning.
Hands-on experience building and owning CI/CD pipelines (for example Jenkins) and shaping how a team works to deliver value sooner and safer.
A good understanding of performance and scalability, and how to design systems that cope with load.
Experience building a high performing, inclusive team culture.
Excellent communication, able to set technical strategy and represent engineering credibly to stakeholders.
Comfortable making sound, defensible decisions with incomplete information.
A broad base across the wider stack, covering performance, data, security, reliability and cloud, so you can weigh up decisions beyond your own area.
Experience designing and running cloud-hosted systems on AWS and making sound architectural decisions about hosting, scaling and cost.
**Desirable**
Experience introducing AI coding tools such as Claude into an engineering team effectively.
An understanding of the demands of building software in a financial environment.
Exposure to React and TypeScript, enough to make sensible cross-cutting decisions in a full-stack team.
Familiarity with tools such as Keycloak for identity and AWS S3 for storage.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Discretionary bonus*
25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
Opportunity to purchase additional annual leave
1 day birthday leave
1 day charity leave
Private health insurance
Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
Season ticket loan for transport
Eye care
Pension (3% / 5% contribution)
Salary sacrifice schemes (cycle to work and electric vehicle)
Monthly socials
Charity events