Tech Lead in England

Currency Cloud was acquired by Visa in December ****. Our Senior Software Engineers are responsible for implementing an industry-leading API that has already processed over 50 billion USD of cross-border transactions for over 5 million end users, and is available to our clients 24x7. But we’re not stopping there, and our engineers are at the forefront of taking us forward to meet the demands of even greater scale.

Our Realtime Data Platform Team is a newly formed group focused on enabling and supporting real-time data capabilities across the organization. This team provides foundational services such as Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Apache Flink, and other streaming technologies, as well as promoting Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) principles that power real-time applications and data flows.

As a Tech Lead, you’ll own the technical vision for the Realtime Data Platform Team. You will define and drive the architecture for shared services that enable real-time data capabilities across the organization. This is a hands-on leadership role where you’ll lead technical strategy, mentor engineers, and ensure alignment with organizational standards. Beyond delivery, you’ll influence how other teams adopt event-driven principles and modern streaming practices, acting as a trusted technical authority across domains.

Our stack runs on AWS as a set of distributed applications using Kubernetes and a microservice-led architecture. We are also utilizing Kafka for our streaming and PACT for Contract testing.

What you’ll get to do:

• Own the technical vision and roadmap for real-time data services, ensuring they are robust, performant, and easy to consume by other teams.
• Lead design and implementation of streaming solutions using Kafka, Flink, and related technologies.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to understand requirements and deliver platform capabilities that accelerate their development.
• Drive best practices for observability, reliability, and scalability in distributed systems.
• Mentor and support engineers within the team, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
• Act as an evangelist for event-driven architectures – implement them, communicate their benefits, and champion adoption across the organization.

You’ll get:

• Clear ownership of technical vision and architectural standards for a critical domain.
• Opportunity to influence and shape a new team from the ground up.
• A modern tech stack and autonomy to innovate.
• Strong organizational support and visibility for your work.

Object-oriented programming forms the bulk of our codebase, currently in Java, versions 11+, and ideally Spring Boot framework. Highly-scalable, highly-available, cloud-native applications on AWS are key to our next phase of growth, are written to 12-factor principles and fit into our microservices architecture. Cloud-related tools, services, and distributed system observability to support these applications, such as Docker, Kubernetes, ElasticSearch, log management systems, and Datadog APM, to name but a few. API specifications, conforming to the OpenAPI (Swagger) standard, provide a clean boundary both externally between our customers and our product, and internally between our microservices. SQL, and large SQL databases, provide the persistence layer for our applications. You’ll be working with (and know the limitations of using) such large datastores.

Infrastructure automation is primarily owned by the infrastructure team, but you will be a consumer of their work; familiarity with AWS, Terraform and Docker is beneficial. Testing approaches, including TDD, BDD and Contract Testing, all form an important part of our approach to quality assurance, ensuring that the code that we write forms products that are fit for use. We currently use a variety of frameworks including JUnit, RSpec and Cucumber.

Agile development, with teams broadly aligned with the Spotify - Squads and Tribes - model, helps us deliver incremental improvements to our products in an iterative manner. Advocating this model, and joining us on a journey of continuous improvement, is a key attribute of members of our teams. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines allow us to automate-all-the-things, providing repeatable builds and consistent deployments. GitHub, and the GitHub PR review process, forms a core part of our developer workflow, and peer reviews help share knowledge and improve quality.

Teamwork, and cross-team collaboration, is fundamental to the delivery of our applications. Whilst each application has an independent path to production, there will always be some activities and initiatives that span multiple teams and require cross-team collaboration. Within your team you’ll need to collaborate with a number of stakeholders, including Product Owners and QA, as part of your product development.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 9 or more years of relevant work experience.
• 5+ years experience in Java or Python Backend Development.
• Passion for event-driven architectures and ability to advocate for them across teams.
• Proven experience leading technical teams or initiatives, including setting architectural direction.
• Skills with functional Java (versions 8+) and Spring (ideally Spring Boot).
• Agile ways of working such as Scrum or Kanban in cross-functional teams.
• Expert knowledge of Docker, EKS, AWS (public cloud) and Kafka.
• Ability to communicate equally effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Modern Cloud-Native architectures and practices.
• Proven delivery of well-tested, scalable, fault-tolerant and performant solutions.
• A pragmatic approach to solutions and delivery of technical projects.
• A self-starter who takes accountability for getting things done.
• Exceptional structure and attention to detail.
• Comfortable challenging the status quo and always curious about the way things work.
• Great written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfortable working in a scale-up or growth environment and as part of a wider team.

Visa is an EEO Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.