Lead Developer (Java)

Overview

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

Responsibilities

• 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

Key requirements

• 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