Senior Software Engineer - Backend

Using technology, innovation, and working collaboratively across our teams, we’re looking to create the leading customer experience within budget hospitality to support our continued growth in the UK and beyond. Your hunger for excellence and creativity will shape the future of our customer experience.

As the new Tech Lead, you will be responsible for the engineering standards, approach, and strategy for the back end technology employed across Whitbread’s Digital systems (currently EKS and other services on AWS). You will be focusing on driving best practice and community and drawing up (or supporting others to draw up) low level designs from business requirements and architectures.

Whitbread are the owners of Premier Inn, and some of the UK’s most loved restaurants. With a website that handles nearly £3 billion worth of transactions per year and a business that employs around 40,000 people, this role will offer you a genuine challenge to keep our customers and colleagues’ data secure.

Role: Technical Lead – Microservices

Salary: From £85,000 plus company performance based bonus of up to 30% and car or car allowance of £5651.00pa

Location: Holborn, London and a hybrid way of working with a minimum of 3 days a week in the office.

Why you’ll love it here:

• Healthcare: Individual and Family BUPA healthcare
• Discounts: Up to 60% discount on Premier Inn stays and 25% discount on our Restaurant brands
• Company Share save Scheme: Share in Whitbread’s continued success.

What you’ll Do:

• Responsible for the direction of engineering across the cloud native backend space, to support the overall Technology plan.
• Governance & decision making for designs, ways of working and solutions to engineering requirements (tech stack, CI-CD, security, patterns etc).
• Support the design process across our platforms, working with business and technology stakeholders to translate business problems into technical designs.
• Supporting the Technical Lead community in driving the Engineering Community of Practice.
• Peer review of technical designs and business requirements.
• Supporting the Maintenance of the Engineering Skills matrix, training plans and development.
• Work with exciting tech stack such as; Kubernetes on AWS with Istio, Java 17, Docker, GraphQL (Apollo), Akamai, Auth0, Jenkins, Maven, Dynatrace, Expert CI/CD, Github, Jira and Confluence.

What we need:

• Proven experience of developing technology platforms, including technical architecture, estimation, planning, non-functional requirements, and Continuous Improvement activities using modern agile techniques.
• Be able to work in an Agile environment where responding to change is a daily requirement.
• Solid experience of designing and building secure highly scalable cloud native web applications.
• Experience working with off-shore partners particularly focusing on fostering amazing working relationships.
• Have expert experience with Java Microservices and cloud native architectures (AWS ideally).
• Are an expert and evangelist for technology and innovation within this specific domain.
• Have experience with CI/CD and the ability to evangelise about this.
• Have experience with tooling solutions eg Kubernetes, Istio, Veracode, Sonarcube, Maven, Jenkins or similar.
• Have some experience of developing training and team development plans to drive performance across multi-skilled teams.
• Have a good understanding of business modelling techniques and approaches to capturing requirements.

Be part of the dynamic Information Technology/Engineering Team. Whitbread are the owners of Premier Inn, and some of the UK’s most loved restaurants. Our Technology team builds products and services that are used by around 40,000 employees and our guests. Everything from an eCommerce website that handles £3 billion in transactions per year, applications that are scalable across our 1,200 hotel and restaurants, devices that enable our teams and guests to have a seamless experience, all whilst keeping data secure.