Lead Software Engineer in Belfast

Imagine catching criminals before they strike—that’s exactly what Napier’s AI‑powered platform does! By analysing transactions and customers in real time, Napier AI’s technology empowers financial institutions to spot suspicious activity, like money laundering, and stops it in its tracks.

Napier AI’s technology works like a digital detective, combining AI with smart analytics to outthink criminals and protect people’s money from becoming criminal proceeds. It’s not just about stopping crime—it’s about making the financial world safer and more trustworthy for everyone. Collaboration, innovation, and wonderful people are just some of the reasons to bring your career to Napier. Our culture is shaped by core values that promote equality, creativity, and opportunity in everything we do.

After successfully securing PI investment to fuel our ongoing growth and to further invest in our AI products, we are currently building out our Tech Hub in Belfast—this is a super exciting time to join Napier in Belfast as we expand.

Overview of the role:

The Technical Lead will head one of our core Engineering teams building our powerful, flexible financial crime detection engine that is used by top financial institutions globally to quickly and easily apply predefined scenarios or machine‑learning algorithms to customer and transaction data. In this role, you will be responsible for building and leading a high‑performance engineering team, guiding their work in alignment with Napier’s overall technical vision and architecture, resolving technical disagreements and managing the technical quality of their deliverables.

You will use your technical leadership talents to ensure the team follows appropriate engineering practices (such as CI/CD, high automation and test coverage, and trunk‑based development), invest in continual improvements to tooling or technical debt, and keep the system evolving to meet changing needs and market opportunities. You’ll continue to be hands‑on when necessary, leading by example and doing what’s needed to keep technical quality high. A desire to teach, to learn and to help grow a culture of delivery excellence in Napier is welcome.

You will also be a key member of the wider Napier leadership group—working closely with Napier Solution Architects, Product Owners, and other stakeholders to define technical standards and improvements in support of Napier’s wider business and technical goals. Your creativity and innovative ideas will be encouraged and supported—we are ready to hear your ideas!

Your day to day:

• Designing and implementing features in Napier’s Continuum that meet high‑quality standards
• Assuring the quality of the team’s deliverables
• Actively participating in technical design workshops and producing technical specification documents as requested
• When required, assuming direct development responsibility for developing, debugging and unit testing of product features in accordance with internal procedures and standards
• When required, diagnosing, and solving functional and performance/scalability issues
• Improving technical practices towards a continuously releasable end‑state, especially in terms of GitHub, CI/CD, and development processes
• Creating a collaborative and inclusive working environment that uplifts developer knowledge and culture
• Participating in technology selection decisions
• Supporting project management and providing creative options when required to achieve business milestones and timelines
• Supporting recruitment by interviewing and onboarding new team members as required
• Providing input on resourcing decisions to address critical bottlenecks or delivery risks

Do you have what it takes?

At least 5‑7 years of commercial experience in a senior or lead engineering role working on micro‑service‑based solutions—industry or sector is open‑minded (does not have to be compliance & AML). Comfortable managing more junior engineers, mentoring them and growing their confidence and expertise to create a high‑performance environment. Experience delivering software to both cloud (multiple vendors) and on‑premises customers in a product/SaaS environment, and a deep understanding of the key considerations in terms of deployment, upgrades, support, and migration. Experience in Agile delivery environments—track record of constantly looking for ways to do things better and excellent understanding of mechanisms needed to implement change successfully. Knowledge of DevOps and infrastructure engineering principles and practices.

Skills:

Essential to be successful in this role:

• Hands‑on programming experience—Scala and either Rust or Go
• Technologies & Tools—Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, GraphQL, GitHub
• Great organisational, analytical, and problem‑solving skills, and ability to adapt quickly and constructively to changing circumstances
• Familiarity with best‑practice technical approaches to complex deployment models (including Kubernetes‑based microservices on cloud and on‑prem platforms)
• Strong understanding of CI/CD principles, versioning techniques and upgrade mechanics, and how these should be combined to predictably deliver high‑quality software at pace
• Collaborative team player with excellent (written and verbal) communication, persuasion, and negotiation skills
• Comfortable working with remote engineering teams and distributed delivery models

We’d be thrilled if you also have experience with, and are keen to grow your skills in, some of these other areas:

• Front‑End languages such as Angular, React, JavaScript
• Programming Languages—Kotlin, Java
• Database and SQL development experience, especially PostgreSQL
• Analytics engines, especially ElasticSearch
• KeyCloak
• ETL tools
• Performance engineering principles and tools
• OpenTelemetry and related observability tools and techniques, especially Grafana and Prometheus
• Azure and AWS or GCP and data processing in cloud

Why Napier?

• Comprehensive private healthcare through AXA covering optical, audio & dental
• 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays, your birthday and a wellness day
• Dedicated pension plan through Aviva
• Life Insurance 4x your annual salary
• Enhanced Maternity & Paternity leave
• Income protections policy
• Work from anywhere for up to 1 month
• Access to our employee wellbeing programme
• Gym membership discounts
• Flexibility in work schedules and locations, ensuring a work‑life balance

This role can be fulfilled either with a hybrid approach or fully in‑office—depending on your preference. An open and flexible culture that allows you to work in the best way for you.

Please note applicants must have the right to work in the United Kingdom. We are unable to offer sponsorship or take over sponsorship of employment visas at this time.