Lead Java Developer (50/50 Leading/Hands-on) in Southampton

Southampton (hybrid, 1 day per week in office) £73-75k + 10% Bonus, 8% Pension, Private Medical. This role cannot offer Visa Sponsorship.

I'm recruiting exclusively for a globally connected business operating at the heart of international trade. Their name is known worldwide and you'll work within a subsidiary building software that directly determines whether goods can move through the country's ports. With significant investment underway to modernise and evolve their platforms, including the use of AI in production, they are looking for a Lead Java Developer to play a key role in driving hands-on technical delivery and engineering standards for a technical team of 6.

This is a genuinely balanced leadership role, sitting 50/50 between hands-on engineering and people management. The environment is heavily backend focused today, centred around Java and Spring-based systems, but there is a clear roadmap towards a more full-stack capability over time. You'll therefore have the opportunity to influence how the team evolves technically and can really make your stamp on the role.

There is also a strong forward-looking element to the role. The organisation is exploring greater adoption of cloud technologies, particularly within Azure, as well as early-stage use of AI both in internal tooling and longer-term product capability. You'll have the opportunity to contribute to these discussions and add these skills to your portfolio commercially.

You'll work closely with architecture and senior stakeholders, taking technical direction and translating it into clear, actionable delivery for your team. A big part of the role is bringing structure, clarity and consistency, ensuring engineering best practice is followed and continuously improved. This includes championing clean code, driving development standards and embedding scalable, maintainable approaches across the team.

What you'll need to succeed:

• You'll be an existing Lead or Senior Java Developer with a background in Spring-based development, driving engineering improvements, best practice, improving code quality and helping move teams forward.
• You'll lead technical delivery whilst remaining close enough to the code to guide decisions for a team (minimum 3 Engineers, ideally 6).
• Strong stakeholder engagement is key, particularly the ability to take direction from architecture and clearly articulate that to engineering teams.
• You'll be confident across backend systems, API development and database interaction (Oracle / SQL), with an awareness of how modern DevOps, CI/CD, cloud and emerging technologies fit into the wider landscape.
• Exposure to Azure or cloud-based environments would be beneficial, as would any experience applying AI in a practical setting, whether through tooling, integrations or early-stage product features.

What you'll get in return:

You'll be joining a business where the systems you build have real-world impact at scale. This is an opportunity to influence both the technical direction and the culture of a team, within an organisation that is actively investing in its technology capability. You will also benefit from a hybrid working model, a guaranteed 10% bonus, 8% pension match, private healthcare, life assurance and 25 days holiday plus bank holidays.

What you need to do now:

At Hays Technology, we are shaping the future of recruitment. The rapid adoption of cloud, which is making customer interfaces more engaging and creating a seamless engagement with businesses, means that from the foundation of your organisation up, software developers are critical to success. As the competition for talent grows, we're ready and waiting to help developers really make an impact on organisations, so talk to us today. We are Hays Technology.

To find out more and to be considered for this position please apply directly, or contact Max Wilcock, Senior Business Director.