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Director of Software Engineering – Backend (Financial Services)

Location: London (Hybrid – 2–3 days per week in office)

Employment: Permanent | Full-time (UK-based)

Tech Ninjas Consultants are partnering with a leading UK digital financial services organisation to hire a Director of Software Engineering. You’ll lead multiple backend teams, shape platform and architecture strategy, and stay close to the code while delivering secure, resilient services that power everyday banking for millions of customers.

What you’ll do

• Lead several backend engineering teams delivering high-availability, cloud-hosted services across payments, identity, onboarding, lending, fraud and core banking.
• Define and evolve backend technical strategy, architecture, and engineering standards.
• Design and deliver distributed, event-driven and microservices-based solutions on public cloud.
• Ensure systems are observable, operable, performant, and straightforward to maintain.
• Drive a strong engineering culture around automated testing (unit, integration, end-to-end, performance).
• Champion secure-by-design principles and protect platforms from malicious actors.
• Eliminate single points of failure and design for resilience, scale and zero-downtime releases.
• Optimise data storage and access patterns (relational and other data stores) for reliability and performance.
• Oversee incident management and production support, ensuring rapid recovery and root‑cause fixes.
• Stay close to the code: review critical changes, pair with engineers and guide technical decisions.
• Manage priorities across multiple workstreams, aligning engineering delivery with product and business stakeholders.

You’ll thrive here if you

• Have extensive experience as a senior/back end engineering leader in complex, mission‑critical environments.
• Have led multiple teams or 30+ engineers in a complex environment.
• Are still comfortable being hands‑on as a back end engineer when needed.
• Are highly proficient in modern Java and experienced with distributed systems and RESTful APIs.
• Understand cloud‑native architectures and have strong experience with public cloud (ideally AWS).
• Are familiar with messaging/streaming technologies (e.g. Kafka, MQ or similar).
• Care deeply about testing, quality, and reliability, and about building secure systems.
• Communicate clearly with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Enjoy coaching engineers, raising engineering standards and building high‑performing teams.
• Have experience in regulated sectors (e.g. financial services, insurance, payments).
• Have deep experience with microservices at scale in production.
• Have strong AuthN/AuthZ experience in distributed systems.

The environment

• Cloud-native microservices stack running on public cloud (AWS preferred).
• Modern Java ecosystem with strong focus on clean code and maintainability.
• Mission-critical, always‑on platforms with strong observability and incident practices.
• Collaborative product, engineering and design culture with genuine influence for senior engineers.

Hiring process (via Tech Ninjas Consultants)

• Intro call with Tech Ninjas
• Conversation with hiring manager / senior engineering leader
• Technical deep‑div (architecture, systems design and leadership‑focused)
• Final stage interviews (technical, leadership, and cross‑functional collaboration)

We move at your pace and keep the process transparent.

Benefits & ways of working

• Hybrid working: London office with 2–3 days per week on‑site
• Flexible working hours where possible
• Strong focus on learning, growth and technical excellence
• Inclusion & equal opportunities

We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to an equitable, accessible hiring process. If you need adjustments at any stage, let us know via Tech Ninjas Consultants.

Interested? Hit Apply

You can also send your CV to info@tech-ninjas.co.uk with the subject line: Director of Software Engineering – Backend.

*Candidates must be based in the UK with the right to work in the UK*

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