Software Engineering Team Lead Core (API & UI), RTGS Technologynew
Bank of England (Bank of England) · Regulator / Central Bank
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- Leeds, United Kingdom
- London, United Kingdom
- Experienced Hires (Scale D and below) · Full time
Software Engineering Team Lead Core (API & UI), RTGS Technology
Permanent
Full Time
Leeds or London
Job Description
Most great engineers don’t set out to manage people. They set out to build something good. At some point, the best of them realise that building something good at scale means more than writing great code yourself — it means shaping the team, the standards, and what “good” means for everyone around you. If that’s the point you’re at, this role is built for you.
As Software Engineering Team Lead for the Core (API & UI) team, you'll own the technical health of the services through which users and systems interact with RTGS. The team is responsible for APIs, user interfaces and access services that enable participants and connected systems to interact with RTGS securely and reliably. Every standard you set, every call you make about what's good enough, happens at a scale most engineers never get near.
You stay in the code, retaining the ability to engage directly with complex implementation and production issues where required. You decide what good looks like for your team, and you build the conditions for it. You’re the technical counterpart to the Product Owner - together you decide what gets built next, and when to fix what’s broken, simplify what’s overcomplicated, and make the whole thing better.
You’ll also be investing in the engineers around you - the people doing this work alongside you are as much your responsibility as the systems they build. Helping them grow, and building a team people want to be part of, is not separate from the job. It is the job, just as much as the code is.
This team follows a you “build it, you own it” model. What you ship is yours - including how it behaves once it’s live. And as you grow into the role, so does it: more influence over the domain’s direction, more say in how the team works, more of a hand in what comes next.
Flexible Working Options
This role is open to flexible working patterns, which may include:
- Flexible start and end times to each day
- A 50% in-office attendance requirement that can be spread across the month, with flexibility to reflect operational commitments such as on-call activity
- There will be occasional out-of-hours activity to support production releases and change testing, which may include limited weekend or non-core hours working
Opportunities in Leeds:
We’re excited to be growing our presence in Leeds, a city we’ve been connected to for nearly 200 years! Our modern, accessible office in the City Centre offers a supportive, flexible working environment. The majority of roles, including this one, are now available in Leeds, giving you the chance to build a meaningful career outside of London while contributing to our mission from a dynamic and growing location. You’ll work collaboratively with London-based colleagues in a hybrid model, with regular opportunities to travel into the London office to meet and connect together in person.
A day in the role:
Your day might begin with the team stand-up - a short sprint check-in where you cut through the noise, surface what actually matters, and make sure the team is pointed in the right direction. You know the codebase and domain well enough to judge what is hard, what is risky, and where focus is required.
You may spend much of your morning in the code itself - reviewing pull requests with rigour, pairing on complex service behaviour, API capabilities, user-facing functionality or production issues that require technical depth and sound engineering judgement. Your experience allows you to engage meaningfully, not just oversee. How much time you spend here depends on your team: if your team is experienced and self-sufficient, you may have more space to contribute directly to design and implementation; if the team needs more guidance and support, more of your time may go into coaching, unblocking and strengthening engineering practices. Both are normal and valuable version of this role.
Mid-morning, you may be in a design session with the Solution Designer, reviewing a new API capability, user-facing feature, or service interaction, stress-testing it against production realities and ensuring failure scenarios, operational considerations and recovery paths are understood before development begins.
After lunch, you could be in a roadmap conversation with the Product Owner - working through what comes next together, making sure there’s room for the technical debt, resilience, and improvement work that keeps the domain healthy, alongside the features that matter to the business.
Later, you may have a 1:1 with an engineer - providing direct feedback, supporting their development, and helping them grow into stronger engineers over time.
No two days are the same, but the thread is consistent: keeping the team clear, supported, and moving. Sometimes that means writing code. Sometimes removing blockers. Sometimes asking the right question before a bad commitment is made. And sometimes leading a calm, effective response when something goes wrong in production.
Role Requirements:
As Software Engineering Team Lead within Core (API & UI), you will own the engineering quality, technical direction, and delivery outcomes of a team responsible for the services through which users and systems access RTGS capabilities.
This isn’t a role where you step back from the work to coordinate it. Your technical judgement directly shapes what gets built, how it is built, and how the team grows — which is exactly why people who care about the craft tend to find this rewarding.
You will:
- Stay in the code - taking on complex, high-impact work alongside your team, not just reviewing what others build. The balance between coding and leading shifts with your team's maturity: when the team is performing well, it largely runs itself and you have more room to go deep technically; when it's still developing, your energy goes into coaching & building the conditions for the team to reach that point.
- Lead by example in code reviews and implementation decisions, holding end-to-end accountability for the quality, resilience, and operability of the services your team builds and runs
- Own how your services behave in production - monitoring, alerting, reliability, and operational health - ensuring they meet the auditability, traceability, and recoverability expectations of a high-value, regulated environment
- Work closely with the Solution Designer to pressure-test technical approaches and translate designs into clear, buildable components
- Define, adopt, and enforce engineering standards across the team, including:
- Testing discipline and coverage
- Code quality and review practices
- Deployment safety and release readiness
- Incident response and operational learning
- Security by Design
- Act as technical counterpart to the Product Owner and co-own the roadmap - making room for technical debt, efficiencies, and continuous improvement alongside features, and forecasting what your team can realistically deliver
- Line-manage your engineers - performance, development, progression, and promotion and build a team environment where people are supported, challenged, and growing
- Take an active role in hiring for your team, including interviewing and assessing candidates
- Track engineering health metrics (e.g. deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, recovery time) to guide investment, and work with peer Team Leads across RTGS Technology to share patterns, solve cross-team problems, and raise standards more broadly
- Participate in on-call as a senior escalation point - leading calm, effective incident response and fostering a blameless culture of thorough post-incident learning
Minimum Criteria
- A strong software engineering background, with experience building, operating and evolving production systems of meaningful complexity.
- Working knowledge of Java, React/Redux and API-based architectures, sufficient to engage meaningfully in technical discussions, review engineering approaches and provide direction across the team.
- Experience working within delivery teams and understanding how technical decisions affect delivery pace, quality and long-term sustainability.
- A solid understanding of distributed systems, data flows and event-driven architectures, including common failure modes and recovery patterns.
- Experience delivering and supporting live services, including troubleshooting, debugging, incident response and ongoing operational ownership.
- Experience mentoring, supporting or providing technical guidance to other engineers.
Essential Criteria
We are particularly interested in candidates ready to step into technical leadership, even if they have not previously held a formal line-management or team-leadership role. If you are an experienced engineer who is technically credible and ready to take the next step, this role is very much for you. These criteria describe the experience, judgement and leadership potential we are looking for, rather than a checklist of previous job titles.
- Proven experience as a Senior Software Engineer, Technical Lead or in an equivalent role within a complex production environment.
- Strong technical leadership and engineering judgement, with the ability to establish standards, challenge technical decisions and navigate trade-offs across quality, pace, resilience, security and cost.
- The ability to lead across different technical disciplines, drawing on the deeper specialist expertise of individual engineers while remaining accountable for the team’s overall engineering quality and direction.
- A track record of improving engineering standards through areas such as code review, testing, implementation practices, deployment safety or technical decision-making.
- Experience contributing an engineering perspective to roadmap, planning and prioritisation decisions, including making space for technical debt, resilience and continuous improvement.
- Demonstrated ability or strong potential to lead, support and develop engineers, creating an environment in which people are challenged, supported and able to grow.
- Calm and credible leadership during incidents or operational challenges, with evidence of turning operational learning into meaningful improvements.
- Clear and direct communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including the ability to explain risks, trade-offs and recommendations.
- Experience of, or willingness to participate in, recruiting and assessing engineers.
Desirable Criteria
It would also be beneficial, though not essential, to have some of the following:
- Experience working with Apigee or another API management platform.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and associated tooling, such as Jenkins and Gradle.
- Experience with messaging and streaming platforms, such as Kafka or IBM MQ.
- Experience with Oracle-backed applications or other data-intensive, high-volume systems.
- Experience in financial services, payments or another highly available or regulated environment.
Don’t hesitate to apply if you don’t meet all of the criteria. We value diverse perspectives and believe different experiences lead to stronger teams and better outcomes.
How this role fits into the wider Bank:
RTGS Technology is moving to a product engineering model, with teams aligned to business and platform domains. The Core (API & UI) team owns the services through which users and systems interact with RTGS, including APIs, user interfaces and access capabilities. Working closely with Core (Backend Services), the team provides secure, reliable and observable access to RTGS functionality.
As Software Engineering Team Lead, you are the technical heartbeat of the team - the person who holds the engineering bar and makes sure delivery stays coherent from design through to production, working alongside a Product Owner, Solution Designer, and Scrum Master who each bring their own part of the picture.
As the team and your capability grow, so will your influence over the domain’s technical direction - architecture, tooling, and the long-term evolution of the platform
- Currently a non-contributory, career average pension giving you a guaranteed retirement benefit of 1/80th of your annual salary for every year worked. There is the option to increase your pension (to 1/65th) or decrease (to 1/105th) in exchange for salary through our flexible benefits programme each year. The Bank has the discretion to vary standard accrual rates and dial up and dial down rates at any time and to withdraw dial up and dial down options at any time.
- A discretionary performance award based on a current award pool.
- An 8% benefits allowance with the option to take as salary or purchase a wide range of flexible benefits.
- 26 days’ annual leave with option to buy up to 12 additional days through flexible benefits.
- Private medical insurance and income protection.
The Bank of England welcomes applications from all candidates, but as a UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) approved sponsor, we have a responsibility to comply with the Immigration Rules and guidance. As such, our ability to employ individuals who require sponsorship for immigration purposes is limited. The Bank cannot guarantee that you and / or the role you are applying for will be eligible for sponsorship and that any application made to UKVI will be successful. Eligibility will therefore be considered on a case by case basis.
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