Staff Backend Engineer (Node or JVM) in London

We are seeking a Staff Engineer to join our software delivery team as a principal contributor. In this role, you will leverage your technical expertise to guide and support a team of engineers, while also actively contributing to the team's development efforts. You will play a key role in driving successful team outcomes, shaping strategic application design decisions, and identifying opportunities to standardise approaches across adjacent teams. Your leadership will help ensure the delivery of high-quality, high-value software to our customers.

What you’ll be doing:

• Leveraging and promoting technically optimal engineering practices across adjacent teams to drive efficient, high-quality outcomes for our customers.
• Advocating for and building elegant, scalable software solutions from complex requirements, while partnering with Solutions Architects to ensure alignment with business value, quality standards, and engineering best practices.
• Defining and guiding the strategy for managing technical debt to maintain secure, resilient, and reliable systems across Legal & General.
• Promoting a culture of continuous improvement by encouraging inspection and adaptation to enhance team effectiveness, productivity, and wellbeing.
• Fostering mutual respect and collaboration within the team by mentoring and supporting less experienced engineers, and facilitating smooth delivery through effective communication.
• Coaching the Developer Community to establish development standards that meet security, compliance, and audit requirements without compromising delivery speed.
• Ensuring all engineering work reflects Legal & General’s commitment to Customer Experience and Treating Customers Fairly principles.

Qualifications

Who we’re looking for:

• Backend - at least 4 years experience working as a backend developer on 1 or more large commercial projects (Node or JVM based frameworks).
• Minimum 2 years of hands-on experience with JavaScript/TypeScript, including deep proficiency in React and REST-based microservice development using JVM Spring or Node.js.
• Solid understanding of mobile and backend application architecture patterns (e.g. MVP, MVVM, Flux, Hexagonal, Onion), clean code principles (e.g. SOLID), and scalable software design.
• Proven experience with test-driven development, testing strategies aligned with the testing pyramid, and a strong focus on security, usability, and accessibility.
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban), Git/Git Flow, CI/CD pipelines, and containerization tools like Docker and Kubernetes.
• At least 2 years of commercial experience with React or React Native, plus working knowledge of GraphQL, AWS services, and mobile performance optimisation.
• Understanding of web, API, and mobile security best practices, observability strategies, and the ability to identify and remediate security flaws in code and infrastructure.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor peers, facilitate technical workshops, drive alignment across teams, and contribute to process improvements with a strategic mindset.
• Skilled in diagnosing complex issues across services, applying root cause analysis techniques, and contributing to architectural evolution and operational excellence.

Whatever your role, we reward performance and behaviour with a package that looks after all the things that are important to you. Here are some of the benefits we offer:

• The opportunity to participate in our annual, performance-related bonus plan and valuable share schemes.
• Generous pension contribution.
• Life assurance.
• Healthcare Plan (permanent employees only).
• At least 25 days holiday, plus public holidays, 26 days after 2 years’ service. There’s also the option to buy and sell holiday.
• Competitive family leave.
• Participate in our electric car scheme, which offers employees the option to hire a brand-new electric car through tax efficient salary sacrifice (permanent employees only).
• There are the many discounts we offer – both for our own products and at a range of high street stores and online.
• In 2023, some of our workspaces were redesigned. Our offices are great spaces to connect and collaborate and have your wellbeing at the heart.

Additional Information

At L&G, we believe it’s possible to generate positive returns today while helping to build a better future for all. If you join us, you’ll be part of a welcoming, inclusive culture, with opportunities to collaborate with people of diverse backgrounds, views, and experiences. Guided by leaders with integrity who care about your future and wellbeing. Empowered through initiatives which support people to develop their careers and excel.

We care passionately about outcomes rather than attendance and are therefore open to discussing all kinds of flexible working options including part-time, term-time and job shares. Although some roles have limited flexibility due to customer demand, we accommodate requests when we can. It doesn’t matter if you don’t meet every single criterion in this advert. Instead, think about what you excel at and what else you can bring in terms of strengths, potential and connection to our purpose.