Senior Application Software Engineer (Java/Spring/Backend) in Manchester

Location: Manchester

Salary: £60,000-£75,000

Workplace Type: Hybrid (3 days a week in the office)

Employment Type: Full‑Time

We are interactive investor (ii), the UK’s number one flat‑fee investment platform, here to help our customers take control of their financial future. For a simple, flat monthly fee we provide a secure home for customer pensions, ISAs and investments. Our flat fee stays the same, so ii customers keep more of their money. Additionally, we provide an industry‑leading selection of investments and a team generating up‑to‑date expert insight. interactive investor has been helping investors for 25 years. We are proud to have over £45 billion of assets under administration, over 500,000 customers, and to be rated ‘Excellent’ on Trustpilot.

Role Purpose

The role is to design, build and support highly scalable, highly available, performant distributed applications to support our web, mobile and business platforms. We are looking for a developer who is excited at building cloud based applications to deploy small change often. You will have a proven skillset that spans OO, DDD and a passion for quality and testing. You will join our Application Engineering team who are responsible for architecting and building our web, mobile, content, trading and internal applications working closely with product and the wider business.

Responsibilities

• As part of the engineering team provide direct support for ensuring solutions for the squads are architected in line with the strategic alignment of the technology area.
• Ensure the smooth transition of technical solutions and knowledge to the wider team at all levels of technical capability.
• Support the discovery, architecture and design of new and more complex solutions and patterns for their delivery stream.
• Work with the Principal Engineer to establish new patterns and architectural designs, or support significant change to an existing solutions.
• Support architecture decisions and solution design processes to an aligned strategy outlined across all of technology disciplines where solutions integrate.
• Directly contribute towards enabling culture of technical development and innovation within the team, through fit for purpose solution design and R&D activities.
• Enable the development of the technical skills within the squad and team through knowledge transfer of emerging technologies and modern ways of working, whilst ensuring that high standards remain at the forefront.
• Ensure that architectural solutions are aligned to the controls outlined by the control standards applicable to the solutions developed within team.
• Support the definition of change specific NFR considerations as part of any solution design or architectural decision.
• Ensure there is a clear alignment to assigned solutions within the change/priority pipeline.
• Ensure that these priorities are managed and any risks relating to the defined work are raised appropriately.
• Support the full development cycle of solution designs to all disciplines, including testing.
• Proactively seek to identify efficiencies around process, solutions and technology.
• Provide direct support for the Engineering Manager and Principal Engineer by taking ownership for and management of delegated subsets of the technical domain.
• Ensure risk considerations are applied to any solution design/architectural decision, highlighting considerations and options as part of any documented solution.
• Ensure full stack security considerations are included in all architectural decisions and subsequent solutions.
• Perform the role of a ‘code guardian’, primarily ensuring that the quality of code delivered through the team is of the expected high standard, as well as supporting the development of individuals in the team to consistently meet these standards.

Qualifications

• Proven experience and background working within a development environment for the technology area.
• Proven experience working within a regulated environment.
• Proven experience working in Financial services or stockbroking.
• Previous experience delivering change to business critical, highly available customer facing platforms.
• A broad technical background, with proven experience supporting diverse technical integrations.
• Experience supporting the delivery of change across the full project lifecycle from initiation to live support.
• Experience delivering successful change through different methodologies including agile and waterfall.
• Experience delivering change onto traditional DC based change/release platforms, as well as cloud based ‘DevOps’ managed environments.
• Experienced in working in a high‑pressure, time critical operating environment.
• Experience of supporting the critical applications of a customer facing digital business.
• Proven experience working autonomously and owning assigned project deliverables.
• Experience of supporting business critical solutions and systems running on cross‑platform technology stacks in a production environment.
• Experience delivering change through Build, Dev and QA to Production, using automation.

Technical Skills

• Architecture and Design Skills.
• Distributed Systems and architectural experience of microservices, event driven architectures and serverless.
• AWS Cloud including step functions, lambda and general AWS architecture.
• Expertise in DevOps and containers environments including Kubernetes.
• Excellent software development, software architecture and technical delivery skills in Java Development including Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Development and tech training presentation skills.
• Kafka, Mongo, Elastic Search and Redis.
• The whole Spring ecosystem included Spring Boot, Spring Cloud AWS, Spring Data, Spring Cloud Streams.
• Typescript / React / React Native Eco System.
• TypeScript and JavaScript Development including Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Development and tech training presentation skills.
• Client-side SPA frameworks, specifically in the React ecosystem for web and mobile-native (React DOM, React Native).
• Server-side SSG and SSR (Next.js, etc).
• Building accessible semantic HTML.
• SEO and SEF.
• Java / JVM Eco System.

Benefits

• Group Personal Pension Plan – 8% employer contribution and 4% employee contribution.
• Life Assurance and Group Income Protection.
• Private Medical Insurance – Provided by Bupa.
• 25 Days Annual Leave, plus bank holidays.
• Staff Discounts on our investment products.
• Personal & Well‑being Fund – Supporting your physical and mental wellness.
• Retail Discounts – Savings at a wide range of high street and online retailers.
• Voluntary Flexible Benefits – Tailor your benefits to suit your lifestyle.

Please Note: We will do our utmost efforts to respond to all applicants. However, due to the high volume of applications we're currently receiving, if you haven't been contacted within 30 days of application, please consider unsuccessful. interactive investor operates in accordance with the UK Equality Act 2010. We welcome applications from individuals of all ages, disabilities, gender identities, marital status, pregnancy/maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. We are committed to treating all applicants fairly and making reasonable adjustments where needed to support disabled applicants. We actively prevent all forms of discrimination, harassment, and victimisation—whether direct, indirect, associative, or perceptive.