Senior Engineer

Location: Cardiff

Hybrid/Flexible Working

Salary: Up to £68k depending on experience, plus a potential bonus of up to £13.6k

The Role

You'll join the Engineering team at LDMS as a Senior Engineer, working within a single team and reporting to an Engineering Team Lead. You'll take on challenging problems your team faces, including designing solutions to complex features and writing the design documentation that others build from. You'll work within the technical direction set by your Lead Engineer and be one of the people they rely on to turn that direction into working software.

Our stack is React and Type Script on the frontend, Java with Spring Boot on the backend, and PostgreSQL with schema-per-tenant multi-tenancy underneath, all cloud-hosted on AWS.

You'll hold the quality bar for your team through code review, pairing and the example you set, and you\'ll lead the delivery of large features. Mentoring and growing more junior engineers is a core part of the job. As you develop, your influence will start to reach beyond your own team.

This is a senior hands-on role, not a line-management one.

Key Responsibilities

These may change with the needs of the business, but the main areas are:

Technical Skills:

• Design solutions to complex features and write the design documentation that other engineers build from
• Hold the technical quality bar for your team through code review, pairing and the example you set
• Spot gaps in testing, security or performance across your team's work, and fix them or make the case for fixing them
• Work within the technical direction and standards set by your Lead Engineer and feedback into them where you see a better approach
• Watch for scaling, reliability and operability problems before they cause incidents and help keep the team's work observable and secure

Delivery:

• Lead the delivery of large features, involving other engineers
• Turn vague or unclear requirements into concrete engineering work the team can pick up
• Keep the team's delivery standards up, and step in when they slip rather than waiting to be asked
• Make sound decisions when the information is incomplete and keep work moving when requirements change or things get blocked

Impact:

• Make a real difference to your team's output, quality and technical ability
• Help junior and mid engineers get better through pairing, honest feedback and giving them work that stretches them
• Contribute to department-wide engineering standards and documentation
• Help shape your team's goals and technical plans and connect the work back to what the business is trying to achieve
• Take part in hiring, running technical interviews and giving well-reasoned assessments of candidates

Communication:

• Explain technical decisions clearly to both engineers and people without a technical background
• Write things down well, such as designs, technical documentation and runbooks that other people can pick up and use
• Help the team reach agreement on hard or contested technical questions
• Give clear, specific and kind feedback in code reviews
• Inform your Engineering Team Lead promptly when a piece of work is failing behind, rather than letting it surface late

AI and Innovation

• Explore new tools, including AI, and help bring the genuinely useful tools into your team's day-to-day work while being honest about where they fall short
• Follow the team's agreed approach to AI-assisted work so that what gets produced stays consistent, secure and good quality
• Use AI coding tools such as Claude in your day-to-day development, moving faster while keeping design quality, security and maintainability high

Requirements

Essential:

• Strong, hands-on expertise in Java (preferably Java 25+) with a solid command of Spring Boot
• Strong relational database skills, ideally Postgre SQL, including schema design and migrations
• A track record of designing and delivering complex features, with design work that other engineers could build from
• Experience holding a quality bar through code review, pairing and example, and mentoring more junior engineers
• Comfortable working within an established architecture and set of standards and improving them where you see a better way
• Familiar with observability in practice, and how services are instrumented, monitored and debugged (for example Prometheus, Grafana)
• Experience keeping a codebase secure and current, including dependency upgrades and vulnerability scanning
• Comfortable working with CI/CD pipelines (for example Jenkins) and a sound understanding of performance and scalability
• Clear communicator, able to explain technical decisions to engineers and non-technical colleagues
• Comfortable making sound decisions when the information is incomplete

Desirable:

• Experience using AI coding tools such as Claude well as part of day-to-day engineering
• An understanding of what it takes to build software in a financial environment
• A widening base across the stack, such as performance, data, security, reliability and cloud so you can weigh up decisions beyond your own area
• Experience working with cloud-hosted systems on AWS, and an understanding of hosting, scaling and cost trade-offs
• Exposure to React and Type Script, enough to work sensibly with patterns defined
• Familiarity with tools such as Keycloak for identity and AWS S3 for storage