Software Engineering Team Lead - Core… at Bank of England · Leeds

Software Engineering Team Lead - Core (Backend Services), RTGS Technology

Location: Leeds, United Kingdom

Job Description

Most great engineers don’t set out to manage people. They set out to build something good. At some point, the best of them realise that building something good at scale means more than writing great code yourself — it means shaping the team, the standards, and what “good” means for everyone around you. If that’s the point you’re at, this role is built for you.

As Software Engineering Team Lead (SETL) for the Core (Backend Services) team, you’ll own the technical health of the Java services responsible for the end-to-end processing and settlement of payments within RTGS. RTGS settles around £800bn a day. Every standard you set and every judgement you make about what is good enough happens at a scale most engineers never get near.

You stay in the code, retaining the ability to engage directly with complex implementation and production issues where required. You decide what good looks like for your team, and you build the conditions for it. You’re the technical counterpart to the Product Owner - together you decide what gets built next, and when to fix what’s broken, simplify what’s overcomplicated, and make the whole thing better.

You’ll also be investing in the engineers around you - the people doing this work alongside you are as much your responsibility as the systems they build. Helping them grow, and building a team people want to be part of, is not separate from the job. It is the job, just as much as the code is.

This team follows a you “build it, you own it” model. What you ship is yours - including how it behaves once it’s live. And as you grow into the role, so does it: more influence over the domain’s direction, more say in how the team works, more of a hand in what comes next.

Flexible Working Options

This role is open to flexible working patterns, which may include:

• Flexible start and end times to each day
• A 50% in-office attendance requirement that can be spread across the month, with flexibility to reflect operational commitments such as on-call activity
• There will be some occasional out-of-hours activity to support production releases and change testing, which may include limited weekend or non-core hours working

Opportunities in Leeds:

We’re excited to be growing our presence in Leeds, a city we’ve been connected to for nearly 200 years! Our modern, accessible office in the City Centre offers a supportive, flexible working environment. The majority of roles, including this one, are now available in Leeds, giving you the chance to build a meaningful career outside of London while contributing to our mission from a dynamic and growing location. You’ll work collaboratively with London-based colleagues in a hybrid model, with regular opportunities to travel into the London office to meet and connect together in person.

A day in the role:

Your day might begin with the team stand-up - a short sprint check-in where you cut through the noise, surface what actually matters, and make sure the team is pointed in the right direction. You know the codebase and domain well enough to judge what is hard, what is risky, and where focus is required.

You may spend much of your morning technically engaged with the team, reviewing Java pull requests with rigour, pairing on complex payment-processing behaviour or working through production issues that require technical depth and sound engineering judgement. Your Java experience allows you to engage meaningfully, not just oversee.

How much time you spend here depends on your team: if your team is experienced and self-sufficient, you may be in the code a great deal; if your team needs more guidance and support — for example, while it is still forming or developing — more of your time may go into coaching, unblocking, and reviewing instead. Both are anormal and valuable version of this role.

Mid-morning, you may be in a design session with the Solution Designer - reviewing a change to a settlement process, stress-testing it against production realities, and ensuring failure scenarios and recovery paths are understood before development begins.

After lunch, you could be in a roadmap conversation with the Product Owner - working through what comes next together, making sure there’s room for the technical debt, resilience, and improvement work that keeps the domain healthy, alongside the features that matter to the business.

Later, you may have a 1:1 with an engineer - providing direct feedback, supporting their development, and helping them grow into stronger engineers over time.

No two days are the same, but the thread is consistent: keeping the team clear, supported, and moving. Sometimes that means writing code. Sometimes removing blockers. Sometimes asking the right question before a bad commitment is made. And sometimes leading a calm, effective response when something goes wrong in production.

Role Requirements:

As Software Engineering Team Lead within Core (Backend Services), you will own the engineering quality, technical direction and delivery outcomes of the Java services responsible for the end-to-end processing and settlement of payments within RTGS.

This isn’t a role where you step back from the work to coordinate it. Your technical judgement directly shapes what gets built, how it is built, and how the team grows — which is exactly why people who care about the craft tend to find this rewarding.

You will:

• Stay in the code - taking on complex, high-impact work alongside your team, not just reviewing what others build. The balance between coding and leading shifts with your team's maturity: when the team is performing well, it largely runs itself and you have more room to go deep technically; when it's still developing, your energy goes into coaching & building the conditions for the team to reach that point.
• Lead by example in code reviews and implementation decisions, holding end-to-end accountability for the quality, resilience, and operability of the services your team builds and runs
• Own how your services behave in production - monitoring, alerting, reliability, and operational health - ensuring they meet the auditability, traceability, and recoverability expectations of a high-value, regulated environment
• Work closely with the Solution Designer to pressure-test technical approaches and translate designs into clear, buildable components
• Define, adopt, and enforce engineering standards across the team, including:
• Testing discipline and coverage
• Code quality and review practices
• Deployment safety and release readiness
• Incident response and operational learning
• Act as technical counterpart to the Product Owner and co-own the roadmap - making room for technical debt, efficiencies, and continuous improvement alongside features, and forecasting what your team can realistically deliver
• Line-manage your engineers - performance, development, progression, and promotion and build a team environment where people are supported, challenged, and growing
• Take an active role in hiring for your team, including interviewing and assessing candidates
• Track engineering health metrics (e.g. deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, recovery time) to guide investment, and work with peer Team Leads across RTGS Technology to share patterns, solve cross-team problems, and raise standards more broadly
• Participate in on-call as a senior escalation point - leading calm, effective incident response and fostering a blameless culture of thorough post-incident learning

Minimum Criteria

• Strong Java engineering background, with experience building and operating production systems of meaningful complexity
• Hands-on experience building and operating backend Java services in production, with the ability to contribute directly in code where required
• Experience working within delivery teams and understanding how technical decisions influence pace, quality, and sustainability
• Solid understanding of modern architectures - APIs, distributed systems, data flows, and event-driven patterns - with practical experience applying these in production systems
• Experience supporting live systems, including troubleshooting, debugging, and incident response
• Understanding of distributed systems and event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka), including failure modes and recovery patterns
• Experience mentoring or supporting other engineers
• A track record of delivering services into production and taking ownership of their behaviour over time

Essential Criteria

We are particularly interested in candidates ready to step into technical leadership, even if they have not held formal line management or team leadership roles before. If you are a senior engineer who is technically excellent and ready to take the next step, this role is very much for you — the essential criteria below describe the experience and judgement we’re looking for, not a checklist of prior job titles.

• Proven experience as a Senior Java Engineer or Technical Lead in a complex production environment
• Independent technical authority across design, architecture, and risk discussions
• Strong engineering judgement - balancing trade-offs across quality, pace, resilience, and cost
• Experience contributing to roadmap and planning decisions, bringing an engineering perspective
• Strong potential for people leadership - able to support, mentor, and develop engineers, with interest in building leadership capability over time
• A track record of improving engineering standards within a team - through code review, testing practice, or technical decisions that outlasted your own changes - and a readiness to take ownership of this more broadly as a technical leader
• Experience owning services in production - including on-call, monitoring, and end-to-end reliability
• Calm, credible leadership during incidents, with evidence of contributing to improvements
• Clear and direct communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience or willingness to take part in hiring — interviewing and assessing candidates for your team
• A genuine interest in helping engineers grow — whether or not you’ve held a formal people management role, you understand what good development looks like and want to invest in it

Desirable Criteria

It would also be beneficial, though not essential, to have some of the following:

• Experience with messaging and streaming platforms (e.g. Kafka, IBM MQ) in production environments
• Experience with Oracle-backed applications in high-volume systems
• Familiarity with CI/CD, build tooling (e.g. Gradle, Jenkins), and modern engineering practices
• Experience in financial services, payments, or other high-availability / regulated environments

Don’t hesitate to apply if you don’t meet all of the criteria. We value diverse perspectives and believe different experiences lead to stronger teams and better outcomes.

How this role fits into the wider Bank:

RTGS Technology is moving to a product engineering model, with teams aligned to business and platform domains. Settlement and Payments is the most critical domain, responsible for the core flows that underpin the UK financial system.

As Software Engineering Team Lead, you are the technical heartbeat of the team - the person who holds the engineering bar and makes sure delivery stays coherent from design through to production, working alongside a Product Owner, Solution Designer, and Scrum Master who each bring their own part of the picture.

As the team and your capability grow, so will your influence over the domain’s technical direction - architecture, tooling, and the long-term evolution of the platform