Staff Software Engineer - BPL in London

Purpose of the role: To design, develop and improve software, utilising various engineering methodologies, that provides business, platform, and technology capabilities for our customers and colleagues.

Accountabilities:

• Development and delivery of high‑quality software solutions by using industry aligned programming languages, frameworks, and tools.
• Ensuring that code is scalable, maintainable, and optimized for performance.
• Cross‑functional collaboration with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define software requirements, devise solution strategies, and ensure seamless integration and alignment with business objectives.
• Collaboration with peers, participation in code reviews, and promotion of a culture of code quality and knowledge sharing.
• Stay informed of industry technology trends and innovations and actively contribute to the organization’s technology communities to foster a culture of technical excellence and growth.
• Adherence to secure coding practices to mitigate vulnerabilities, protect sensitive data, and ensure secure software solutions.
• Implementation of effective unit testing practices to ensure proper code design, readability, and reliability.

Expectations:

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change.
• Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures.
• If managing a team, define jobs and responsibilities, plan for the department’s future needs and operations, counsel employees on performance and contribute to employee pay decisions/changes.
• Lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements.
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard.

Leadership Behaviours:

• L – Listen and be authentic
• E – Energise and inspire
• A – Align across the enterprise
• D – Develop others

For an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi‑year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long‑term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions. Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross‑functional areas of impact and alignment. Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda. Demonstrate leadership and accountability for risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does. Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business. Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies. Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions. Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes. Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.

Experience Required:

To be successful as a Staff Software Engineer you should have experience with:

• Deep expertise in backend engineering and building large‑scale distributed systems within a cloud environment preferably AWS (Azure, GCP also suitable).
• Expert level mastery of Java or Kotlin, Scala, or similar JVM language.
• Data Layer Expertise – Experience with both SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis) databases, understanding when to use each.

Some other highly valued skills may include:

• Proven experience working with AI Technologies or machine learning integration.
• FinTech, Payments, scaling Tech or start‑up domain experience.
• Rust – Experience with systems programming and performance‑critical services.
• Kubernetes – Container orchestration experience with K8s, Helm, and cloud‑native deployment strategies.
• React – Modern frontend development skills with React, TypeScript, and state management libraries.
• Observability – Experience with monitoring, logging, and tracing tools.
• CI/CD Wizardry – Extensive DevOps mindset with experience in automated deployment pipelines, infrastructure as code, and GitOps practices.
• Messaging & Events – Solid grasp of messaging technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, NATS) and event‑driven architecture patterns.
• API Design – Proven track record designing and implementing RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs that scale.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen, strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job‑specific technical skills.

Working Location: The successful candidate will be based in London. Our offices are located at 1 Churchill Place and 7 Westferry Circus (new BPL office). We support a hybrid working pattern with 3 days per week office‑based presence expected.

Working Hours: Our team operates an on‑call rota and so weekend and evening working may be required on occasion.