Lead Java Kotlin Developer

Salary: £50,000 - 70,000 per year

• Strong Kotlin experience, or significant Java experience with a willingness to learn Kotlin.
• Experience leading or acting as a senior engineer within an agile delivery team at squad level.
• Proven ability to refine and decompose work into implementable stories, manage dependencies, and remove technical blockers.
• Strong experience in microservices and API development.
• Experience with asynchronous messaging technologies such as Kafka or similar event‑driven platforms.
• Experience in at least two or three of the following: API development, SQL/databases, HTML/JavaScript.
• Strong technical and analytical troubleshooting skills, including a production support mindset.
• Experience with standard developer collaboration tools such as Git Hub/Bitbucket, Jira, and Confluence.
• Excellent written and spoken English, with the ability to communicate technical decisions clearly.
• Good interpersonal skills and a collaborative approach to working across engineering, testing, product, and control owners.

• Provide day‑to‑day technical leadership for our agile engineering team, supporting the Tech Lead to deliver outcomes at pace and with quality.
• Lead technical input into backlog refinement by breaking epics and features into well‑defined user stories, clarifying acceptance criteria, identifying dependencies, and ensuring work is delivery ready.
• Support sprint planning by shaping technical approaches, identifying spikes, and helping the team size work appropriately.
• Design, develop, and implement primarily back‑end features, including Kotlin/Java APIs and services, with a small element of UI work using a simple UI framework.
• Build and evolve APIs and microservices, applying consistent engineering patterns for error handling, logging, resilience, and security by design.
• Contribute to architectural and design decisions with the Tech Lead, documenting key decisions and trade‑offs where needed.
• Design, build, and deliver in‑house solutions end to end, from shaping initial ideas and requirements through development, testing, and ongoing support.
• Coach and uplift the team in development best practice, including clean code, test‑driven development, secure coding, and maintainable design.
• Drive effective peer reviews and engineering standards to ensure code quality, readability, and attention to detail.
• Work in an agile CI/CD environment to deliver rapid iterations at a sustainable velocity, promoting automation and quality gates.
• Collaborate with developers, testers, and the wider organisation to build, run, and improve products.
• Proactively engage with customers and users to resolve issues, respond to feature requests, and reduce recurring operational pain.

• API
• Bit Bucket
• CI/CD
• Confluence
• Git Hub
• Support
• JIRA
• Java
• Java Script
• Kafka
• Kotlin
• REST
• SQL
• Security
• microservices
• UX UI Design
• TDD

We are hiring a Lead (Kotlin/Java) for our Sheffield team, with three days a week onsite being mandatory. This is a contract role where you will support an agile engineering team and work closely with the Tech Lead to deliver quality outcomes  work with Kotlin, Java, microservices, REST APIs, SQL/databases, HTML/JavaScript, and asynchronous messaging/event‑driven architectures such as Kafka. We value proactive ownership, collaboration, technical leadership, and strong engineering standards in a fast‑moving CI/CD environment.

last updated 29 week of 2026