Lead Engineer in Cardiff

Salary: up to £78,000, depending on experience plus a potential bonus up to £15,600

A senior technical leadership role where you'll lead and help shape the direction of greenfield systems at one of Europe's leading financial businesses.

About LDMS

Founded in 2018, LDMS is part of the LC Financial Holdings group, a three-pillar organisation with over 950 employees across Europe.

Between us we have more than 20 years of world-class credit expertise.

We build digital lending software in a market growing around 18% a year.

We want to lead that space, and to do it we need people who can think, create and challenge each other to find the best solutions for our customers.

We have an ambitious to-do list: improving what we've built, building new products, and moving into new markets.

The Role

You'll join the Engineering team at LDMS as our Lead Engineer, reporting to an Engineering Team Lead.

You'll be embedded in one team, but your technical influence will reach well beyond it.

You will set the technical direction that the Senior Engineers around you build within and you are the person the wider department turns to for its more challenging technical decisions.

Our stack is React and Type Script on the frontend, Java with Spring Boot on the backend, and Postgre SQL with schema-per-tenant multi-tenancy underneath, all cloud-hosted on AWS.

This is an opportunity to shape greenfield systems, not maintain legacy ones.

This is a technical leadership role, not a line-management one.

Your focus is the long-term technical health and direction of a significant part of what we build.

This includes the architecture, the standards, and the capability of the engineers working within your domain.

You'll stay deeply hands‑on and you'll be trusted to make the calls that are expensive to reverse.

Key Responsibilities

• These may change with the needs of the business, but the main areas are:
• Technical Direction
• Own the long-term technical strategy for a core domain of the platform and drive the architectural work needed to get there, not just the next feature.
• Produce the designs and reference architectures that other engineers build from with confidence and without rework.
• Set and own the technical standards for your domain and lead Senior Engineers in applying them consistently.
• Liaise with the Principal Engineers to keep your domain’s technical strategy, tooling and patterns aligned with the wider technical direction.
• Anticipate scaling, resilience, security and operability risks before they become incidents and drive best practice such as observability, security-by-design and robust testing.
• Track where the industry is heading and judge, proactively, what is worth bringing into our stack.
• Delivery
• Own delivery outcomes for large, complex pieces of work and keeping momentum through ambiguity and changing requirements.
• Influence roadmap prioritisation based on technical risk, complexity and strategic value, not just delivery execution.
• Identify systemic delivery problems and drive structural fixes, rather than working around them.

Make sound, defensible decisions with incomplete information and model the delivery discipline you expect of others.

• Impact
• Raise the technical capability of Senior Engineers working within your domain through design leadership, review and pairing.
• Build standards, patterns and a culture of technical excellence that persist and compound after any single project ends.
• Have visible, structural impact beyond your immediate team, influencing how other teams work or what they build.
• Work with Engineering Management on department-level strategy and standards and shape the engineering hiring bar and team culture.
• Communication and Influence
• Communicate technical strategy clearly to engineers, product, and business stakeholders.
• Produce written work such as design documentation, RFCs and proposals that shifts how the organisation thinks and drives alignment across teams.
• Influence other teams and resolve significant disagreements through reasoning and trust, without needing to escalated.
• Build an external technical profile through conferences, open source, or industry community, in ways that raise our reputation and help us attract talent.
• Encourage open technical discussion and build active engineering communities across our main communication channels.
• AI and Innovation
• Trial new tools and technologies, including AI and embed the ones that help into how the team works day to day, while being honest about their limits.
• Set the standards for how the team uses AI, codifying our patterns and guardrails into the tooling itself so that AI‑assisted work stays consistent, secure and high quality as it scales.
• Lead by example in day-to-day development with AI coding tools such as Claude, using them to move faster while holding the bar on design quality, security and maintainability.

Essential

• Deep, hands‑on expertise in Java (preferably Java 25+) with strong command of Spring Boot.
• Strong relational database skills, ideally Postgre SQL, including schema design, migrations and working with data at scale.
• A track record of setting technical direction for a domain or service area, with decisions that proved sound and were rarely reversed.
• Experience raising the capability of a team of engineers, not just mentoring individuals, but lifting the standard of the group.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical delivery of complex, ideally greenfield systems over sustained periods.
• Strong grounding in observability, setting the standard for how services are instrumented, monitored and debugged (for example Prometheus, Grafana).
• A history of keeping a codebase secure and current, owning Java and dependency upgrades and vulnerability scanning.
• Hands‑on experience building and owning CI/CD pipelines (for example Jenkins) and shaping how a team works to deliver value sooner and safer.
• A good understanding of performance and scalability, and how to design systems that cope with load.
• Experience building a high performing, inclusive team culture.
• Excellent communication, able to set technical strategy and represent engineering credibly to stakeholders.
• Comfortable making sound, defensible decisions with incomplete information.
• A broad base across the wider stack, covering performance, data, security, reliability and cloud, so you can weigh up decisions beyond your own area.
• Experience designing and running cloud‑hosted systems on AWS and making sound architectural decisions about hosting, scaling and cost.

Desirable

• Experience introducing AI coding tools such as Claude into an engineering team effectively.
• An understanding of the demands of building software in a financial environment.
• Exposure to React and Type Script, enough to make sensible cross‑cutting decisions in a full‑stack team.
• Familiarity with tools such as Keycloak for identity and AWS S3 for storage.
• What's Important to Us

Our passion is tech, but the people we bring together are the heart of the business.

Over the years we've recruited a fairly eclectic bunch, with hobbies from gaming to ultra‑marathon running, snowboarding to chess, hiking to climbing.

What we share are our values

• Teamwork
• Merit
• Develop
• Honest
• Impactful
• Integrity

They might look like corporate jargon, but they mean something to us. If they sound like you, get in touch. There's a good chance you'd be a great fit.

• Discretionary bonus*
• 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
• Opportunity to purchase additional annual leave
• 1 day birthday leave
• 1 day charity leave
• Private health insurance
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
• Season ticket loan for transport
• Eye care
• Pension (3% / 5% contribution)
• Salary sacrifice schemes (cycle to work and electric vehicle)
• Monthly socials
• Charity events

*The discretionary bonus will be pro-rata'd during your first year with the Company.

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