Lead Kotlin Full-Stack Engineer - Cloud & Microservices

Hippo Digital; Leeds; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Contributory Pension Scheme (Hippo 6%&

Perkbox access for discounts

Critical illness cover

Life assurance

Cycle-to-work

Electric vehicle salary sacrifice

Season ticket loans

Private health cover

Additional holidays

Charity contributions

Tree planting

Job summary

Hippo is a rapidly growing digital consultancy seeking a Lead Full Stack Kotlin Developer to join our Leeds-based team. You will guide multi-disciplinary squads delivering secure, scalable digital solutions across public and private sectors.

You will act as technical SME, shaping architecture, leading delivery, and mentoring engineers while collaborating with data, design, product, and delivery teams to solve complex client problems. Expect travel to client sites as needed.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in Kotlin and the full development lifecycle delivering user-centered digital solutions (with a strong foundation in Java/JVM).
• Proven track record of leading a delivery team to deliver high-quality, robust, and scalable solutions.
• Expertise in building back-end services using Kotlin with Spring Boot and the wider Spring Framework (Spring MVC, Spring Security, REST APIs).
• Experience in Microservices design and architecture, including RESTful API services and Kotlin-based microservice patterns.
• Expertise in public-cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and DevOps practices, including containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• In-depth knowledge of Infrastructure as Code tools such as CloudFormation or Terraform.
• Proficient in using CI/CD tools such as Jenkins or Azure DevOps.
• Experience with front-end technologies (e.g., Angular, React, and TypeScript).
• Previous experience working on GOV/NHS projects or in a consultancy environment.
• Experience migrating legacy Java codebases to idiomatic Kotlin.
• Experience with asynchronous messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and Kotlin Coroutines/Flow for reactive programming.
• Familiarity with Kotlin-native frameworks (e.g., Ktor) or functional programming libraries (e.g., Arrow).

Responsibilities

• Act as technical SME within the squad to produce user-centered software based on business requirements and best practice.
• Collaborate with colleagues and stakeholders to design and deliver solutions to complex client problems.
• Continuously review and prioritize the delivery team's workload.
• Design and manage software development and deployment pipelines, resolving issues and bottlenecks.
• Communicate prototypes, solutions, and progress to internal and external stakeholders clearly.
• Lead the recruitment and onboarding of other engineers and mentor their professional development.

Skills

Kotlin

Java/JVM

Spring Boot

REST APIs

Microservices

AWS/Azure/GCP

Docker/Kubernetes

CI/CD

TypeScript

Angular

React

Kafka

Terraform

CloudFormation

Ktor

Tools

Jenkins

Azure DevOps

Terraform

CloudFormation

Job description

Hippo is a rapidly growing digital consultancy seeking a Lead Full Stack Kotlin Developer to join our Leeds-based team. You will guide multi-disciplinary squads delivering secure, scalable digital solutions across public and private sectors.

You will act as technical SME, shaping architecture, leading delivery, and mentoring engineers while collaborating with data, design, product, and delivery teams to solve complex client problems. Expect travel to client sites as needed.