Lead Developer (Java) - Bristol Regional Centre - 3 Glass Wharf

About the job

Discover a career in your hands at HMRC. Whether you're seeking purpose, growth, or a workplace that gives you a true sense of belonging, hear from some of our employees as they share their story about what it's really like to work at HMRC. At HMRC we are committed to creating a great place to work for all our colleagues; an inclusive and respectful environment that reflects the diversity of the society we serve. We want to maximise the potential of everyone who chooses to work for us and we offer a range of flexible working patterns and support to make a fulfilling career at HMRC accessible to you.

Diverse perspectives and experiences are critical to our success and we welcome applications from all people from all backgrounds with the experience and skills needed to perform this role. At HMRC, we are already one of the most digital organisations in the UK. We have one of the largest data sources, and we're creating a world-class IT function. HMRC is building a modern, digital tax administration.

With 50 million customers to serve, over 60 thousand colleagues to support, and 600 billion to collect to fund UK Plc, our IT operation is huge. Operating at this level isn't for everyone, but those ready for the challenge will find unique opportunities to work with advanced technologies and create lasting impact. Chief Digital and Information Office (CDIO) set the technology direction for HMRC and deliver the high-level design for all IT solutions. We are responsible for building and running HMRC IT services along with providing IT change and operational support.

The Borders and Trade Delivery Group are responsible for the end to end service management and development of over 140 separate services, from the generation of Trade Statistics, to the administration of Customs and Excise duties. This is an exciting role as a key member of the delivery team, collaborating with partners throughout the full delivery lifecycle to ensure delivery and support of highest-quality software products. Our developers work closely with business analysts, testers and product owners within a truly collaborative environment.

As Lead Developer in HMRC, you will be responsible for setting technical strategy and direction, ensuring the delivery of high-quality, scalable, and secure services. You will guide and support fast paced engineering teams across the full service lifecycle, providing expert judgement on complex technical issues and acting as the escalation point for high-risk challenges. More broadly, your leadership within the Development Guild will shape engineering standards, development processes, and solution design, ensuring all work meets rigorous quality and security benchmarks while aligning with business needs.

You will contribute to the developer community, providing technical leadership, coaching and mentoring the guild, promoting knowledge sharing and adoption of good practice. You will guide the ways in which the team works and be proficient in a wide range of technical systems and involved in identifying appropriate technology and approaches, deciding when software should be written. You will lead delivery of high quality software that meets user needs, and be responsible for overseeing the development of clean, secure code following a test-driven approach.

Person specification

This role will suit an experienced technical leader who is proactive and self-driven, able to anticipate risks and opportunities, take ownership of outcomes, and drive progress while maintaining high standards for quality, security and operational performance.

• Proactive and self-driven: spots issues early, initiates improvements, and follows through without needing close supervision.
• Strategic thinker with strong technical judgement: able to balance delivery speed, risk, cost and long-term maintainability.
• Leads through influence: sets clear engineering standards, builds alignment, and makes decisions transparently using appropriate governance.
• Coaching mindset: mentors engineers, grows capability across teams, and promotes knowledge sharing and consistent ways of working.
• Quality and security focused: advocates for clean code, test-driven development, secure-by-design principles and strong assurance practices.
• Collaborative communicator: works effectively with product, architecture, operations and delivery partners, translating between technical and non-technical audiences.
• Resilient under pressure: acts as a calm escalation point during incidents and high-risk decisions, staying focused on outcomes and learning.

Key responsibilities

• Set technical strategy and direction, ensuring architectural decisions, tooling choices and design approaches support scalable, secure, high-quality services.
• Provide expert judgement and act as the escalation point for complex or high-risk technical issues, guiding teams towards robust resolutions.
• Lead and influence engineering standards, ensuring development, testing and operational practices meet quality benchmarks across teams and services.
• Oversee the full lifecycle of build/run/improve, ensuring services remain resilient, compliant and aligned to user and business needs, even when not personally hands-on.
• Provide leadership to developers, delegating technical work, supporting planning, reviewing solution approaches, and ensuring development is on track and to the expected quality.
• Assure security compliance, embedding secure-by-design principles and ensuring risks are understood and mitigated.
• Lead on solution design & technical decision-making, including reviewing and challenging design choices (e.g., Redis persistence strategies, interface behaviours, microservice consolidation).
• Ensures compliance with performance and design standards, influencing cross-team technology choices (e.g., SSO, Keycloak, REST template decisions).
• Mentor and develop engineers, promoting knowledge sharing, and raising capability.
• Contribute to the development of robust, accurately estimated, project plans, considering risk and mitigation.
• Critical decision making: Making and recording effective decisions following the appropriate decision-making criteria, framework or guidance.

Additionally, the post holder will work normal office hours though may be required to occasionally attend the office outside of normal working hours (for example to support software releases). The post holder may be required to provide part of a 24/7 on-call Rota.

Essential Criteria

• Java for API development and accompanying technology REST APIs, Spring (Boot / Cloud / etc), REDIS, Kubernetes, Docker
• Java messaging (JMS / Kafka / RabbitMQ)
• CI/CD technology (Gitlab CI, Infrastructure as Code)
• Database technology (MySQL & Oracle)
• Testing methodologies and tooling (BDD / TDD / Integration tests)
• AWS (S3, EKS)
• JavaScript for UI development and accompanying technology (Typescript/REACT, Single Sign On)
• Architecture (Containerised Microservice Design Patterns, Cloud native)
• Hands on experience of migrating legacy monolith applications to modern architecture and development practices
• Experienced in leading developers during advanced problem-solving during complex incidents, integration challenges and production issues

Desirable Criteria

• Generative AI technology for use in Software Engineering
• Awareness of Product Ways of Working
• HMRC Borders and Trade domain knowledge

Transitional Sites

For more information on where you might be working, review this information on our locations. If your location preference is for one of the following sites, it's important to note that these are not long-term sites for HMRC and we will require you to move to a new building in the future, subject to our location strategy and the applicable employee policies at that time. These sites are: Telford Plaza, Telford - moving to Parkside Court, Telford.