Engineering Lead II - Contacts & Recipients (Java team)

🔒 Confidential Employer
Posted 25 March 2026
LOCATION
London
TYPE
Full-time
LEVEL
Mid-Senior level
SALARY
£153,000 / year
CATEGORY
Technology
This employer holds a UK Home Office sponsor license — sponsorship for this specific role is at the employer’s discretion

SKILLS

Java Backend Engineering Distributed Systems Leadership Product Mindset Communication Architecture Scaling

FULL DESCRIPTION

Engineering Lead II - Contacts & Recipients (Java team)

[Employer hidden — view at passion-project.co.uk] is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money.

The team you will join: Contacts

The Contacts team is a core team at [Employer hidden], dedicated to making adding, finding, and managing your recipients as easy as possible. We own this experience end-to-end: from the scalable platform securing tens of millions of bank accounts customers send to, to the intelligent search algorithms and local integrations (like Pix) that power discovery, all the way to the customer-facing screens where users interact with their counterparties. The team is integral to [Employer hidden]’s day-to-day operations — if our services go down, [Employer hidden] goes down.

Job Description

What will you be working on:

  • Reimagining the contacts domain. We need to fundamentally rethink how we model people, businesses, and bank accounts. You and your team own the architecture for this: it’s a complex distributed systems challenge that touches everything: bank accounts, local payment networks, and the next generation of [Employer hidden] features.
  • Scaling for [Employer hidden] Platform: This isn't just for the [Employer hidden] app. Big banks and enterprises use our API, which means our search and validation engines need to be lightning-fast and bulletproof, even when our biggest partners turn on the tap.
  • Defining the product roadmap: You’re not here to just churn through a backlog. You’ll work side-by-side with your Product Manager to figure out what we build next. You’ll be the one making the tough calls between shipping fast, staying secure, and building for the long term.
  • Growing the team: You will start with a large, high-output team with the potential to scale it further.

Technical responsibilities:

  • Technical authority: You will act as the primary technical owner for the domain. You must meet the expertise bar of a senior back-end engineer, capable of driving deep architectural discussions and addressing technical debt autonomously.
  • Operational excellence: Drive initiatives to improve reliability and security. You will ensure the team proactively manages the health of the services that process millions of critical customer data points daily.

Leadership responsibilities:

  • Team autonomy: Lead, mentor, and coach a team of 9 engineers, building a culture where the team can deliver quickly and reliably without your day-to-day intervention in every task.
  • People development: You are responsible for the performance and career growth of your engineers, identifying future leaders who can help you scale this domain.
  • Cross-functional alignment: Work closely with Regional teams, [Employer hidden] Platform, and other functions to ensure our roadmap aligns with the wider [Employer hidden] strategy. You will help the team navigate complex priorities and make trade-offs between speed, risk, and quality.

What do you need?

  • Strong technical background: Expert in backend engineering (Java ecosystem preferred) with a track record of designing complex, distributed systems. You understand the difference between "working code" and "scalable architecture."
  • Leadership experience: You have led high-performing teams (hiring, performance management, coaching). You know how to manage a large team by delegating effectively to senior engineers.
  • Product mindset: You understand the "why" behind the "what." You can map technical efforts directly to business goals and customer value.
  • Strategic thinking: You can switch between reviewing a Pull Request and planning the 12-month technical strategy for a critical business domain.
  • Communication: Excellent communicator, capable of articulating technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to haves:

  • Experience in fintech, payments, or "Identity/Graph" data domains.
  • Experience building high-throughput APIs for enterprise/platform clients.
  • Previous experience scaling a domain from a single team into multiple squads.
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