Principal Java Engineer

Principal Java Engineer

Department: Tech

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Wallingford, UK - Hybrid

Description

Mission: As Principal Java Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for GTI's core SaaS platform. Reporting directly to the CTO, you will own the technical direction, architecture and engineering standards of the platform without direct line management responsibility. You will work closely with Product, Data, Operations, DevOps and QA teams to deliver secure, resilient and scalable solutions while mentoring engineers through technical leadership and best practice.

Outcomes

Platform architecture is scalable, resilient, secure and supports current and future business needs

Own the application architecture and technical direction across multiple products and services.

Design, implement and review high-quality Java and full-stack solutions, APIs and integrations.

Lead performance optimisation, scalability and resilience initiatives.

Drive security best practices, vulnerability remediation and secure software development lifecycle (SDLC) practices.

Work closely with Data, Operations, DevOps and QA teams to ensure architectural alignment and operational excellence.

Product roadmap is delivered successfully through strong technical leadership and effective engineering execution

Provide technical leadership across multiple Agile development teams.

Translate business and product requirements into robust technical solutions.

Support engineering teams in the successful delivery of roadmap commitments.

Facilitate collaboration across teams to remove technical blockers and mitigate delivery risks.

Mentor and guide developers to improve capability, quality and delivery outcomes.

Engineering standards, architecture principles and best practices are consistently applied across development teams

Define, maintain and champion engineering standards, architectural principles and development best practices.

Conduct design and code reviews to ensure quality, maintainability and consistency.

Author new development processes and continuously improve existing engineering practices.

Promote secure, scalable and maintainable software design across all teams.

Support and mentor team members to drive technical excellence and continuous improvement.

Production systems are reliable, observable and operationally excellent

Lead root cause analysis and resolution of complex production issues.

Drive improvements in system observability, monitoring and operational performance.

Ensure applications are designed and operated to meet reliability, availability and performance targets.

Partner with Operations, DevOps and QA teams to maintain production stability and service quality.

Embed a culture of operational excellence, continuous improvement and proactive issue prevention.

Technologies you will be using:

Java 21 (LTS)

Spring Framework 6 / Spring Boot 3.5

Hibernate ORM 6.6+, JPA

Apache Tomcat 11, IntelliJ IDEA

AI Tooling (Claude, Codex, Gitlab Duo, etc)

REST APIs, OpenAPI, Microservices, Event-driven architecture (RabbitMQ)

Containers, Docker, AWS, Linux

CI/CD with GitLab Pipelines & Jenkins

Observability: logging, metrics and monitoring

MySQL, Apache Solr

Front-end UI (e.g. Angular)

Person Specification

Strategic and systems-thinking mindset

Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills

Ability to influence through technical leadership rather than line management

Proactive, pragmatic and outcome-focused

Strong mentoring and collaborative working style

High standards of engineering excellence and continuous improvement

Trusted technical advisor

Excellent attention to detail

Work Experience, Knowledge & Skills:

Degree in Computer Science (or equivalent experience)

Extensive Java software engineering experience with significant experience in technical leadership

Expert knowledge of Java, JVM performance and modern language features

Deep experience with Spring Boot, Hibernate/JPA and enterprise application architecture

Strong understanding of distributed systems, scalability, resilience and performance tuning

Experience with cloud-native applications, Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD

Strong knowledge of application security, OWASP principles and secure development practices

Knowledge of a modern front-end node-based framework

Other Information

Permanent role – 37.5 hours per week. Monday to Friday 9am-5:30pm.

3-month probationary period.

Candidates applying for roles at GTI will be subject to background screening. You can find out more about our background screening and the recruitment of ex-offenders by reading our policies.

If you would like to speak to a member of our team to find out more information about this vacancy or you have any questions, please get in touch - [email protected].

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