In this Lead Developer role, you will define technical direction for scalable, secure services and guide a fast-moving engineering team through the full delivery lifecycle. You’ll act as a design authority, translating business needs into robust architectures while staying hands-on to validate concepts. You’ll champion secure-by-design and resilience, ensuring high-quality software aligns with enterprise patterns. This is a chance to shape HMRC’s world-class IT and impact services serving millions of customers.
Pay / Benefits
Civil Service Pension scheme
Flexible and Hybrid Working
25 days leave (rises to 30)
Salary £58,541 - £72,711
Moves Adjustment Payment consideration (Leeds)
Coaching and development
Responsibilities
Set technical strategy and direction to support scalable, secure services
Provide expert judgement and escalate complex technical issues
Act as design authority ensuring alignment with Enterprise Architecture Patterns
Oversee build/run/improve lifecycle ensuring resilience and compliance
Provide leadership, delegate work, review approaches, and maintain quality
Assure security compliance and embed secure-by-design principles
Lead solution design and technical decision-making across teams
Ensure performance, design standards, and cross-team technology choices
Contribute to project plans with risk assessment and mitigation
Make and record critical decisions following governance frameworks
Key requirements
Detailed designs for complex, secure, resilient Java services and enterprise-scale applications
Strong Java engineering background with capability to challenge designs
Experience with REST APIs, Spring Boot/Cloud, Redis, Kubernetes, Docker
Java Messaging (Kafka / RabbitMQ)
Relational and non-relational databases (MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB)
Knowledge of cloud-native distributed design; hosted on AWS (S3, EC2, EKS)
Experience with microservice architectures and UML diagram techniques
Stakeholder management and collaboration with BA, Delivery Managers, Product Managers
Hands-on delivery experience with advanced problem-solving in complex integrations
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