Senior Java Engineer

Pulse Group; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Pulse Group partners with a major UK retailer to build a brand-new engineering capability within their Customer Fulfilment technology programme.

They’re investing in an in-house platform that can integrate with multiple automation vendors, robotics systems and warehouse technologies. You’ll be a senior hands-on Java engineer owning architectural decisions and guiding a UK team as the platform grows.

Qualifications

• Experience designing distributed, event-driven systems.
• Greenfield product or platform from conception to production.
• Architectural ownership across microservices and domain design.
• Hands-on with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) and databases.

Responsibilities

• Design cloud-native Java services from scratch.
• Own architecture decisions across service boundaries.
• Integrations with automation vendors, robotics, and warehouse tech.
• Take systems from first commit to production with ownership of performance.
• Set engineering standards and mentor developers via code reviews.
• Collaborate with Product Managers and external vendors on complex decisions.
• Shape engineering standards across a distributed programme.

Skills

Java

Event-driven design

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Code reviews

Tools

Kafka

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

How often do you get the opportunity to join a major organisation and build something genuinely greenfield from the ground up?

The Company

Pulse Group are exclusively partnering with one of the UK’s largest and most recognised retail organisations as they build a brand-new engineering capability within their Customer Fulfilment technology programme.

They're investing heavily in bringing more of their technology and IP in-house, moving away from reliance on a single external automation vendor and creating a flexible, reusable platform capable of integrating with multiple automation vendors, robotics systems and warehouse technologies.

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to play a key role in that journey.

The opportunity

This isn't a role where you'll inherit a mature platform, spend six months learning the codebase and make incremental changes around the edges.

You'll be joining an incredibly talented engineering team within this Customer Fulfilment programme, helping build a new plug-and-play platform designed to work across different vendors, hardware and automation technologies.

You'll have genuine ownership over architectural decisions across service boundaries, contracts and domain design, working alongside a Principal Software Developer who sets the wider architectural direction.

Importantly, this is technical leadership, not people management.

You'll still be writing code, reviewing code, solving difficult engineering problems and taking your own technical decisions all the way through to production. At the same time, you'll help mentor a talented but relatively young UK team and establish what great engineering looks like as the platform grows.

What you'll be doing

• Designing and building cloud-native, event-driven Java services from scratch
• Owning architecture decisions across service boundaries, contracts and domain design
• Building integrations across automation vendors, robotics systems and warehouse technologies
• Taking systems from first commit through to production, with genuine ownership of how your decisions perform in the real world
• Setting engineering standards and mentoring other developers through code reviews and pair programming
• Working closely with Product Managers and external technology vendors on complex integration decisions
• Helping shape engineering standards across a distributed programme spanning the UK and other global offices.

What we’re looking for

You'll need to be a seriously hands-on Senior Java Engineer who has built and shipped complex, enterprise-scale systems in production with:

• Experience designing distributed, event-driven systems, ideally using Kafka or equivalent messaging technologies
• Experience taking a greenfield product or platform through to production
• Genuine architectural ownership across microservices, service boundaries, contracts and domain design
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform: AWS, Azure or GCP
• Experience across SQL and NoSQL
• The ability to provide technical leadership and mentor engineers while remaining hands-on
• Experience working within complex, high-volume or latency-sensitive enterprise environments

Sector experience isn't the deciding factor here. They're much more interested in the scale and complexity of the engineering problems you've solved.

Interested?