Java Technical Lead

IntaPeople: STEM Recruitment; Cardiff; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

IntaPeople are partnering with a well-established financial software business in Cardiff to hire an Engineering Team Lead who will stay hands-on around 90% of the time while mentoring a team of four engineers and coordinating with customers and stakeholders to deliver real business results.

You will drive technical direction, shape delivery, and foster a culture of high standards, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications

• Strong engineering judgement and hands-on software development experience.
• Proven track record delivering software projects with dependencies and trade-offs.
• Experience communicating delivery status and risks to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Write, review, and ship production code with the team.
• Set technical direction aligned with product goals.
• Mentor engineers and conduct growth-focused 1:1s.

Skills

Java / Spring Boot

Line management

Delivery planning

Stakeholder communication

Mentoring & coaching

AI usage in dev

Front-end (React/TypeScript)

Tools

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI/CD

Job description

IntaPeople are delighted to be partnering with a well-established financial software business to find an Engineering Team Lead for their Cardiff engineering hub.

Are you a senior engineer ready for your next step? Do you want to stay hands-on while you build your leadership skills? Then this could be the role for you.

AI is changing the way software gets built. Teams are smaller, output is higher and the pace is faster. In this role you'll spend around 90% of your time on hands-on development. The rest goes on leading a team of 4 engineers, driving delivery, and working with customers and stakeholders to get real results. You'll report to Engineering Management and build financial software used by partners and clients.

What you'll be doing

Technical leadership and development

• Writing, reviewing and shipping production code alongside your team
• Setting clear technical direction that lines up with team and product goals
• Guiding design decisions and building a review culture that teaches, rather than just approves
• Spotting technical debt early and working with senior engineers to embed engineering standards

Delivery and execution

• Planning and tracking delivery, and raising risks and scope changes early
• Breaking complex work into deliverable increments with clear dependencies and acceptance criteria
• Running delivery sessions and whiteboarding workshops to shape and unblock work
• Managing dependencies with other teams and making sensible trade-offs on scope, quality and pace
• Balancing product features with technical debt, and keeping ways of working lean and adaptable

People and development

• Mentoring and coaching your engineers through guidance, review and honest career conversations
• Running structured one-to-ones focused on growth, wellbeing and clearing blockers
• Giving direct, evidence-based feedback and supporting each person's progression
• Interviewing and hiring strong engineers, and building a culture of high standards and psychological safety

AI and innovation

• Encouraging the team to use AI where it clearly helps, and being honest about where it doesn't
• Making AI and automation a lasting part of how the team works day to day
• Using simple team measures to track progress and catch work that's slipping

Stakeholders and communication

• Explaining technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to product and non-technical colleagues
• Managing expectations proactively, so status updates bring no surprises
• Escalating issues at the right time, with options rather than just problems
• Communicating release content to customers and giving them confidence in what's coming and when

What you'll bring

• Strong engineering judgement and an understanding of how good software gets built, hands-on in Java / Spring Boot
• A proven track record of planning, tracking and delivering software projects, including dependencies and trade-offs
• Experience communicating delivery status, risks and trade-offs clearly to non-technical and customer-facing audiences
• Line management experience, or a strong record of coaching and mentoring and the readiness to step into formal line management
• A real interest in helping engineers progress their careers
• Confidence using data and metrics to report progress and spot problems early

Nice to have

• An interest in using AI to help teams build software
• Experience in the financial sector
• Front-end experience, ideally React / TypeScript
• Modern CI tooling such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD…
• Monitoring and observability tooling such as Grafana or Prometheus

About our client

Our client is an established provider of credit and loan management software, with around two decades of experience delivering technology across EMEA. Their platform supports multiple jurisdictions, languages and currencies, and helps users work more effectively with confidence in regulatory compliance.

You'll join a highly experienced engineering team at their Cardiff tech hub. It's a business that believes the best technology gives a real business advantage, and that is embracing AI to change how software gets built.