Senior Software Engineer (Java, Spring Boot) in Manchester

Contract Type: Full time, Permanent

Location: Manchester, Hybrid (2 days onsite)

Our Team: How We Enrich Everyday Life

You’ll be joining Bauer Media Audio (BMA), Europe’s biggest commercial audio broadcaster, connecting audiences across nine markets to the music, stories and experiences they love. Bauer Media Audio is making a significant investment in a new in‑house software engineering hub in Manchester. This new hub reinforces Manchester’s position as a key technology centre for Bauer Media Audio, alongside its existing locations. We’re creating a new engineering team to build innovative business-critical solutions that will power Bauer Media’s audio platform of the future.

The Difference You Will Make

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in laying the technical foundations of this new engineering team. You’ll lead hands-on development of infrastructure and prototyping work, mentor engineers, and collaborate across disciplines to deliver secure, resilient, and high-performing systems. Working closely with your squad, you will ensure the squad's work aligns with our technical direction and product priorities, contributing to a culture of continuous improvement, shared ownership, and engineering excellence. You will play a key role in helping to create a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment that is psychologically safe, where everyone can be their authentic selves and do their best work, every day.

Your Role

• Build and deliver: Develop and maintain features and services across the platform, taking end-to-end ownership of your work from design through to deployment. Contribute to early-stage prototyping and infrastructure work, helping to shape the foundations of the platform.
• Shape technical direction: Contribute to architectural decisions within your squad, sharing your experience and perspective to inform technical choices. Collaborate with your Lead Engineer and product colleagues to ensure your work aligns with the squad's technical direction and delivery goals.
• Mentor and support: Support the growth of junior engineers through code review, pairing, and knowledge sharing — helping to build a team where everyone improves together. Play your part in growing the team — contributing to interviews and helping new engineers get up to speed quickly.
• Champion quality and operational excellence: Champion DevOps practices, CI/CD, and a culture of automation and observability as a natural part of how you build. Lead on testing strategies and uphold security standards day to day. Participate in incident management rotas, providing hands-on technical support and clear communication during high-pressure situations.

What We're Looking For

• Technical capability: Solid hands-on engineering experience, with active proficiency across frontend and backend development – enough to lead by example and contribute to technical decisions. Experience with our core stack — a Java Spring Boot, AWS, Kubernetes and Kafka back end, with a TypeScript/React front end. Experience designing and building services within a microservices or domain-driven architecture — defining service boundaries and working with asynchronous, event-driven communication (e.g. via Kafka) — and an understanding of how those decisions play out once services are running in production. CI/CD, containerisation, and modern DevOps practices applied as part of everyday delivery. Security best practices embedded in day-to-day development. An interest in AI-assisted development tooling and how it can improve productivity and code quality.
• Collaboration and communication: Experience mentoring engineers and supporting their growth, with an awareness of how to adapt your approach to different people and experience levels. Strong communication skills – able to collaborate across disciplines and articulate technical ideas clearly to non-technical colleagues. A habit of documenting decisions and sharing knowledge across the team.
• Industry and delivery experience: Experience working in a product-led, agile software delivery environment. Incident management experience or familiarity with on-call responsibilities. Media, audio streaming, or consumer platform experience is a plus.

Working Pattern and Location

This is a permanent, hybrid, full-time role with an in-office presence twice a week in our Manchester hub. Like all roles in the team, this one includes participation in incident management rotas – we schedule these collaboratively, taking into account everyone's responsibilities and commitments outside of work.

Why Join Us?

• The chance to work in a team building platforms that reach millions of listeners across Europe, with real impact on the products people use every day.
• A growing engineering organisation investing heavily in its people, practices, and technology – with genuine support for skills development.
• A collaborative, product-led environment where engineering has a clear and respected voice in shaping business outcomes.
• An environment that values empathy, accountability, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.

About Bauer Media Group

We are a media business focused on creating content that matters to millions of people across Europe. Our offering extends from print and online publishing to audio broadcasting and entertainment, alongside investments in other media related sectors. With more than 500 million copies sold each year, we are one of Europe’s largest Publishers. From women’s and celebrities’ magazines to TV listings to food and special interest, we own some of the most popular publishing brands in Germany, UK, Poland and France – both digital and print. But not only that. Reaching over 61 million listeners weekly, we operate over 150 radio and podcast brands in nine countries, spanning the UK, Ireland, Poland, Slovakia, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Portugal. Family-owned in the 5th generation, Bauer Media focuses on the long-term, with a consumer-first mindset that guides us across our diverse portfolio. Our workforce of 12,000 shares a common purpose: to deliver content and services that enrich people‘s everyday lives.

What’s in it for you

• You’ll have 28 days holiday, bank holidays & 2 volunteer days to use.
• Your development matters, so access to our internal training provider – Bauer Academy, is a huge win.
• We have enhanced Maternity/Adoption, Paternity and Shared Parental Leave Pay.
• You’ll have the opportunity for flexible working.
• And much more!

We are an international employer and equal opportunities are important to us. That's why we welcome everyone in their uniqueness, regardless of e.g. religion, gender, skin color, disability in our house. We are committed to ensuring our recruitment process is inclusive and accessible to all. If you have a disability or a long term health condition, and need us to make any reasonable adjustments or do anything differently during any stage of the recruitment process, please let us know by emailing careershub@bauermedia.co.uk.

We are actively recruiting for this position, so the job advert may close earlier than expected.

If you have any feedback regarding our UK recruitment process, please email careershub@bauermedia.co.uk we would love to hear from you.