Hybrid Kotlin Full-Stack Tech Lead

Hippo Digital; Manchester; On-site; GBP 59,000 - 99,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension

Holidays

Wellbeing support

Private cover options

Salary sacrifice schemes

Volunteering opportunities

Relocation support

Job summary

Hippo Digital in Manchester is seeking a highly skilled Kotlin-focused backend engineer with extensive experience across the Java/JVM ecosystem, Spring Boot, and microservices. You will lead delivery teams, design scalable backend services, and work across cloud platforms.

The role involves collaborating with clients, mentoring engineers, shaping pipelines with Docker/Kubernetes, and supporting GOV/NHS projects.

Qualifications

• Extensive Kotlin experience with full dev lifecycle across JVM stack.
• Proven track record leading delivery teams delivering robust solutions.
• Back-end design with Kotlin + Spring Boot and REST APIs.
• Experience in microservices and RESTful services.
• Cloud and DevOps experience: Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms.
• IaC tools like CloudFormation or Terraform.
• CI/CD tooling such as Jenkins or Azure DevOps.
• Frontend exposure with Angular, React, TypeScript.
• GOV/NHS consultancy experience.
• Migration of legacy Java to Kotlin.
• Async messaging with Kafka and Kotlin coroutines/Flow.
• Kotlin-native frameworks like Ktor or Arrow.

Responsibilities

• Serve as technical SME within the squad, delivering user-centred software aligned to business needs.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to explore, design, and deliver solutions for complex client problems.
• Continuously prioritise and review the delivery team's workload.
• Design and manage software development and deployment pipelines, resolve bottlenecks.
• Lead recruitment and onboard engineers, mentoring and coaching the team.

Skills

Kotlin

Java/JVM

Delivery leadership

REST APIs

CI/CD

Cloud platforms

Front-end basics

Kafka / reactive

Kotlin Coroutines/Flow

Tools

Spring Boot

Spring Framework

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

CloudFormation

Jenkins

Azure DevOps

Ktor

Arrow

Job description

Hippo Digital in Manchester is seeking a highly skilled Kotlin-focused backend engineer with extensive experience across the Java/JVM ecosystem, Spring Boot, and microservices. You will lead delivery teams, design scalable backend services, and work across cloud platforms.

The role involves collaborating with clients, mentoring engineers, shaping pipelines with Docker/Kubernetes, and supporting GOV/NHS projects.