Lead Java Engineer, Payments - Low-Latency, High-Scale

JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Bournemouth; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Bournemouth is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for the Payouts team, focused on Payment Initiation. You will be a core technical contributor shaping secure, scalable payment platforms and distributed systems used across the organization.

The role requires deep expertise in high-scale systems, Java and Kafka, and a strong focus on observability, resiliency, and operational excellence for critical financial applications.

Qualifications

• Formal training or certification on software engineering concepts and applied experience or relevant practical experience in software engineering, distributed systems, or production platform engineering.
• Hands-on practical experience delivering system design, application development, testing, deployment, and operational stability for complex production systems.
• Advanced proficiency in one or more programming languages, preferably Java, with strong understanding of object-oriented design, concurrency, performance tuning, and secure coding practices.
• Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems in high-scale, low-latency environments.
• Practical experience with event-driven architecture and messaging platforms, preferably Apache Kafka, including topics, partitions, consumer groups, offsets, ordering, retries, dead-letter handling, idempotency, and failure recovery patterns.
• Experience with relational databases and/or distributed data stores, including SQL and NoSQL databases, data modeling, query optimization, transaction handling, consistency patterns, replication, and high-availability design.
• Strong understanding of payment processing, payment initiation, payout flows, transaction lifecycle, reconciliation, idempotency, duplicate prevention, failure handling, and auditability.
• Experience improving operational stability by reducing manual intervention, automating remediation, tuning alerts, eliminating recurring incidents, and reducing MTTR.
• Advanced understanding of agile methodologies, CI/CD, application resiliency, cybersecurity, and secure software engineering practices.
• In-depth knowledge of the financial services industry and its technology systems, controls, risk expectations, and operational disciplines.
• Practical cloud-native experience, including designing or operating applications on public or private cloud platforms using containers, orchestration, infrastructure automation, and cloud resiliency patterns.

Responsibilities

• Executes creative software solutions, design, development, and technical troubleshooting with the ability to think beyond routine or conventional approaches to build solutions and break down complex technical problems.
• Designs, develops, tests, deploys, and operates secure, high-quality production code for high-scale, low-latency payment initiation systems.
• Leads technical design and implementation of distributed systems using technologies such as Java, Kafka, relational databases, NoSQL databases, event-driven architecture, APIs, and cloud-native platforms.
• Provides technical leadership across application design, system integration, data flow, resiliency patterns, and operational readiness for business-critical payment platforms.
• Builds and supports systems with demanding non-functional requirements, including throughput, latency, availability, scalability, recoverability, fault tolerance, observability, and condensed service-level agreements.
• Identifies opportunities to eliminate, reduce, or automate remediation of recurring production issues to improve overall operational stability and reduce mean time to detect, diagnose, recover, and resolve incidents.
• Drives engineering practices that improve MTTR, system reliability, deployment safety, rollback capability, alert quality, and production support effectiveness.
• Develops secure, high-quality production code and reviews, debugs, and improves code written by others.
• Partners with product, operations, architecture, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to deliver payment initiation capabilities aligned to business objectives and risk expectations.
• Champions engineering excellence through code quality, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, performance engineering, chaos/resilience testing, and secure software development practices.
• Leads communities of practice across Software Engineering to drive awareness and adoption of modern engineering practices, distributed systems patterns, and leading-edge technologies.

Skills

Java

Kafka

Distributed systems

APIs

NoSQL databases

SQL databases

CI/CD

Cloud-native

Observability

Security best practices

Job description

JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Bournemouth is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for the Payouts team, focused on Payment Initiation. You will be a core technical contributor shaping secure, scalable payment platforms and distributed systems used across the organization.

The role requires deep expertise in high-scale systems, Java and Kafka, and a strong focus on observability, resiliency, and operational excellence for critical financial applications.