Engineering Lead - BPL in London

Overview

hackajob is collaborating with Barclays to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

About The Role

As a Principal Software Engineer for our Platform team, you are both an architect of our engineering principles and a builder of the ground we stand on. This is a high-leverage position where you’ll define how we scale, how we deploy, and how we maintain excellence. You’ll spend your time at the intersection of deep technical strategy and hands-on execution, ensuring our internal systems are as polished as our customer-facing products.

What You’ll Be Working On

• With a ruthless focus on optimising developer experience, you’ll lead on designing, operating, and refining our internal developer platform.
• Leading the migration toward (or optimisation of) distributed systems, ensuring high availability and low latency.
• Support a rapidly growing set of product engineering teams in building, shipping, and operating software quickly and safely.
• Establish platform defaults for the majority of workloads with escape hatches where teams have strong reasons to deviate.
• Lead on the creative design and implementation of control and compliance points within our SDLC to enable teams to ship multiple times a day, rather than acting as stop-gates.
• Build tooling for monitoring, logging, and rapid incident response frameworks and playbooks for teams.
• Mentorship: elevate the engineering organisation through RFCs, workshops, and communities of practice, beyond just code reviews.

What You Need

• Extremely pro active, detail oriented Engineering leader
• Significant experience in Director level Engineering Senior leading roles
• A storied history building complex, scalable systems and preventing failures at scale
• Mastery of cloud, Kubernetes, and the broader CNCF ecosystem
• Polyglot mindset with expertise in at least two languages (e.g., Rust, Go, Kotlin) and a right tool for the job philosophy
• Product thinking — treat the platform as a product with fellow engineers as customers
• Craft of communication — explain complex technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including topics like service mesh

What Success Looks Like

Success is measured by the velocity and confidence of the entire engineering organisation, minimising the tax of infrastructure so feature teams can focus on delivering value. Mentorship of senior and staff engineers and fostering a community of practice that values simplicity and automation. The platform should be invisible in the best way possible: a seamless, reliable foundation empowering every engineer.

Our Guiding Principles

• Strong opinions, weakly held – approach engineering decisions objectively to balance idealism and pragmatism.
• Automate everything – if you have to do it twice, script it; if three times, make it a feature. Everything-as-code.
• Simplicity is a feature – prefer boring, reliable tech unless there is a compelling reason to trial or switch.
• Ownership is absolute – we build it, run it, and fix it.
• Ruthless transparency – share designs, failures, and successes openly within the organisation.

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.

Purpose of the Role

To lead and manage engineering teams, providing technical guidance, mentorship, and support to ensure the delivery of high-quality software solutions, driving technical excellence, fostering a culture of innovation, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to align technical decisions with business objectives.

Accountabilities

• Lead engineering teams effectively, fostering a collaborative and high-performance culture to achieve project goals and meet organizational objectives.
• Oversee timelines, team allocation, risk management and task prioritization to ensure successful delivery within scope, time, and budget.
• Mentor and support team members' professional growth, conduct performance reviews, provide actionable feedback, and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Evaluate and enhance engineering processes, tools, and methodologies to increase efficiency, streamline workflows, and optimise team productivity.
• Collaborate with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
• Enforce technology standards, facilitate peer reviews, and implement robust testing practices to ensure the delivery of high-quality solutions.

Director Expectations

• Manage a business function, contribute to function-wide strategic initiatives, and influence policy and procedures for the function; plan, manage, and consult on multiple complex projects.
• Lead a large team or sub-function, or for an individual contributor, lead organisation-wide projects and act as a deep technical expert and thought leader; train and coach less experienced specialists.
• Provide expert advice to senior management and committees to influence decisions outside the function; contribute to function-wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function; escalate policy breaches appropriately.
• Foster compliance and ensure regulations are observed; monitor external environment to influence Barclays when appropriate.
• Demonstrate knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division to achieve overall objectives; maintain up-to-date sector knowledge and external insights.
• Use analytical skills to solve complex situations; exercise authority to make significant decisions; negotiate with stakeholders at senior levels.
• Act as principal contact for key clients and counterparts in other functions; be mandated as a spokesperson for the function and division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate leadership behaviours: Listen, Energise, Align, Develop others. All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate Barclays Values: Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship, and the Barclays Mindset: Empower, Challenge and Drive.