Lead Software Engi

Lead Software Engineer - Retail Technology

Full Time

London - hybrid

Who are Just?

We're a FTSE 250 Financial Services company who specialise in retirement solutions. With the defined benefit buy in / buy out space growing each year, Just continues to annually grow its business by over £4bn of assets.

We are a purpose-driven company with compelling and credible goals. We help people achieve a better later life by providing competitive and innovative products, services, financial advice, and guidance to help our customers achieve security and peace of mind in retirement.

Purpose

We are looking for an experienced Tech Lead to play a pivotal role in transitioning critical on-premise applications to modern cloud architectures hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. You will be responsible for fostering a culture of engineering excellence, enhancing team maturity across the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), and ensuring the delivery of scalable, resilient, and observable systems.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership

1. Lead the design, development, and deployment of modern cloud-native solutions, migrating legacy on-prem VB and C# applications to Azure-based platforms.
2. Architect robust, scalable, and secure solutions using Azure, Docker, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
3. Champion best practices in observability, resilience, and scalability within all technical solutions.
4. Drive the adoption of microservices, API-first architectures, and event-driven systems, where applicable.

Team Development & Maturity

1. Mentor, coach, and develop engineering teams to enhance technical capability and maturity across the SDLC.
2. Foster a culture of continuous improvement, agility, and DevOps practices, promoting automation and CI/CD pipelines.
3. Act as a role model for engineering excellence, ensuring high-quality code, peer reviews, and effective documentation.

Stakeholder Collaboration

1. Work closely with Product Owners, Solution Architects, Business Analysts, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
2. Influence and guide technical decisions at both strategic and tactical levels.
3. Communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders effectively.

Operational Excellence

1. Implement strong observability practices, leveraging tools for monitoring, logging, and alerting to ensure system health and performance.
2. Design for high availability, disaster recovery, and resilience to meet stringent SLAs in a regulated financial environment.
3. Proactively identify technical debt and drive initiatives to address it.

Required Skills & Experience:

Technical Expertise

1. Proven experience leading modernisation projects from legacy on-prem systems (VB, C#) to cloud-native architectures.
2. Strong hands-on knowledge of Microsoft Azure, including Azure DevOps, AKS, Docker, and microservices.
3. Solid understanding of containerisation, orchestration, and cloud infrastructure as code (e.g. ARM templates, Terraform, Ansible).
4. Experience with observability tools (e.g. Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Prometheus, Grafana).
5. Deep understanding of resilience patterns, scalability, and high-availability architectures.

Skills

1. Demonstrable experience mentoring and growing engineering teams, improving practices across the SDLC.
2. Strong background in Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD pipelines.
3. Ability to foster a culture of accountability, technical excellence, and continuous learning.
4. Excellent communication, influencing, and stakeholder management skills.
5. Strategic thinker with strong problem-solving capabilities.
6. Adaptable and resilient in a fast-paced, evolving environment.

Company Benefits

1. A Competitive Salary, Pension Scheme, and Life Assurance
2. 25 Days Annual Leave plus an Additional Day for your Birthday
3. Private Medical Cover and Income Protection
4. A generous and highly achievable bonus scheme - paid annually based on individual and company performance
5. Opportunity to progress within your career both in-role and within the company
6. FREE access to the Headspace App, a 24/7 Employee Assistance Helpline, and Trained Physical & Mental Health First Aiders (On-Site)
7. A variety of Employee Funded Benefits available via our Online Benefits Portal
8. Several additional purchase options available for you and your loved ones

Why Just?

We are committed to building a more sustainable business and have publicly committed to reduce our scope 3 emissions to Net Zero by 2050 and our scope 1 and 2 emissions to Net Zero by 2025. We encourage our people to make small and meaningful changes in their everyday lives.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) is a key priority for Just. We have joined a number of initiatives designed to improve outcomes for employees from underrepresented backgrounds.

What's clear about working at Just is that we care. We care about our customers, our purpose, our environment, inclusivity, wellbeing, and most importantly - each other.