Staff Engineer - Java 17
London, UK (Hybrid)
Permanent
Up to £85,000 + benefits

About the Role

This is a chance to join a global technology leader, working alongside one of the UK's most recognisable retail brand, on a large-scale transformation of its digital and engineering ecosystem.

You'll be part of a modern, product-led engineering environment, helping shape systems that operate at enterprise scale, with a real focus on innovation, resilience, and customer impact.

What you'll be doing

• As a Staff Engineer, this is more than a senior coding role, you'll act as a technical authority, combining deep hands-on delivery with architecture ownership and engineering leadership.
• Build and evolve Back End services using Java 17 and Spring Boot
• Design and implement event-driven architectures using Kafka, including schema evolution, idempotent consumers, and resilient messaging patterns
• Contribute to system design and architectural decisions across complex, distributed platforms
• Drive cloud-native engineering practices, working across modern cloud stacks (AWS/Azure)
• Champion CI/CD and DevOps excellence, with strong exposure to Jenkins and pipeline automation
• Promote engineering best practices across testing, observability, and secure development
• Work closely with product and delivery teams in a cross-functional, agile environment
• Mentor engineers and help raise the technical bar across the team

What we're really looking for (Staff-level mindset)

This role is for engineers who think in systems, not just services.

You'll need:

• Strong hands-on experience with Java 17+, Spring Boot, and modern Back End engineering
• Proven delivery of event-driven systems (Kafka) in production environments
• Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins) and DevOps principles
• Experience building cloud-native systems (AWS) with scalability and reliability in mind
• Strong grounding in automated testing (unit, integration, contract, performance)

What sets you apart at Staff level

This is where the role really differentiates beyond coding:

Architecture-first thinking

• Strong experience with distributed systems design, trade-offs, and scalability
• Deep understanding of Clean/Hexagonal Architecture, SOLID, CQRS, resilience patterns

Event-driven & Domain-driven design

• Experience modelling systems using DDD (bounded contexts, domain events, aggregates)
• Strong grasp of asynchronous communication and system boundaries

Engineering leadership

• Ability to influence technical direction and standards
• Comfortable mentoring and elevating other engineers
• Pragmatic decision-making balancing delivery vs engineering quality

Operational excellence mindset

• Experience with observability (logs, metrics, tracing) and production systems
• Exposure to secure coding, reliability engineering, and performance tuning

Nice to have

• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, or infrastructure as code (Terraform)
• Familiarity with NoSQL (MongoDB), caching (Redis), and data optimisation
• Exposure to test frameworks (Playwright, Selenium)
• Some Front End awareness (React/TypeScript)
• Experience integrating with enterprise systems or complex data flows