Tech Lead - Payments Platform (AI Native)

Murmuration; Manchester; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company pension scheme

30 days holiday

Hybrid working from Manchester office

Job summary

Murmuration is seeking a hands-on Tech Lead to build and scale the payments platform in an early-stage team. You will lead design, coding and mentoring, acting as the primary technical escalation and shaping the product architecture with AI-enabled tooling.

You’ll work from our Manchester office in a hybrid setup, report to the CTO, and have a real say in technology choices while delivering secure, compliant, high-quality code for credit unions.

Qualifications

• Experience building asynchronous event driven systems.
• Strong experience mentoring small engineering teams.
• Proficiency in Java, Kotlin or Scala.
• Experience with databases (Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, CosmosDB).
• Fluency with AI coding tools and secure coding practices.
• Interest in fintech, payments, or financial inclusion.

Responsibilities

• Designing, building (with AI), and shipping features across the whole payments platform.
• Mentoring the payments platform engineering team.
• Enforcing quality standards in the delivered builds.
• Working closely with other disciplines to meet compliance standards and scheme provider requirements.
• Using AI coding tools to work quickly while maintaining quality, testing, and security.
• Working with platform engineers to design/build high performing CI/CD pipelines with fast feedback.
• Influencing architecture and technical decisions as part of a small senior team.
• Taking features from design through implementation, testing, deployment and support.
• Writing automated tests and reviewing others' code; helping set engineering standards.

Skills

Event-driven

Mentoring

Java

Kotlin

Scala

Databases

Third-party APIs

AI coding tools

Testing & CI/CD

Security practices

Ownership mindset

Fintech interest

Job description

As a hands-on Tech Lead at Murmuration, you will lead the build of the payments platform that will be used to process cards and card payments. You will contribute code whilst being the primary technical escalation for the team – unblocking issues, reviewing code, mentoring and supporting. We work in an AI-native way; we expect you to be fluent with AI coding tools and have enough confidence in your own abilities to support and develop the team in working this way. Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, you'll be one of the first engineers here, with a real say in the product and how it's built.

About Murmuration

Murmuration is a new technology company building the core platform that credit unions run on. We provide the software, payments, and data infrastructure that lets a credit union offer its members modern digital banking without having to build or run the technology itself.

Credit unions are member-owned and rooted in their communities, but many still operate on systems that are decades old, which limits what they can offer their members. We're building the alternative.

We're a new company, putting our platform and our first engineering team in place now, with the backing of an established group. For people who join early, that means a real say in the product, the architecture, and how the company works.

What you'll be doing

• Designing, building (with AI), and shipping features across the whole payments platform
• Mentoring the payments platform engineering team
• Enforcing quality standards in the delivered builds
• Working closely with the other disciplines to ensure the payments platform meets the required compliance standards and requirements of the scheme providers.
• Using AI coding tools to work quickly, without dropping standards for code quality, testing, and security whilst supporting the team in their own use of AI coding tools.
• Working closely with the platform engineers to design and build high performing CI/CD pipelines that provide fast feedback
• Having a strong influence on architecture and technical decisions as part of a small, senior team
• Taking features from design through implementation, testing, deployment, and support
• Writing automated tests, reviewing other people's code, and helping set the engineering standards here
• Working closely with product, design, and the platform and payments engineers

What you'll bring to Murmuration

• Experience building asynchronous event driven systems
• Strong experience in mentoring small engineering teams
• Strong experience with Java, Kotlin or Scala
• Strong experience with database technologies (e.g. Postgres, MySql, SqlServer, DynamoDB, CosmosDB)
• Strong experience integrating third-party services
• Fluency with AI coding tools as part of your day-to-day work, and a sensible view on where they help and where they don't
• A strong grounding in the fundamentals: testing, version control, CI/CD, and secure coding
• Comfortable working at an early stage, with a lot of ownership
• An interest in fintech, payments, or financial inclusion

Standout candidates will also...

• Experience in designing, building and maintaining payment platforms
• Experience in designing and building platforms from scratch
• Experience in fintech, banking, payments, or another regulated or high-trust domain
• Experience with cloud-native development (AWS/Azure/GCP), containers, and infrastructure-as-code
• Experience setting engineering standards or mentoring a small team
• Salary of £80,000 – £95,000 depending on experience
• 30 days holiday per year plus Bank Holidays
• Hybrid working from our Manchester office
• Company pension scheme
• An early, hands-on role building a new platform and team
• Structured career path with support for ongoing learning and development