Lead Developer (Java)

Job summary

Discover a career in your hands at HMRC. Whether you're seeking purpose, growth, or a workplace that gives you a true sense of belonging, hear from some of our employees as they share their story about what it’s really like to work at HMRC.

Visit our YouTube channel to watch the full series and come and discover your potential.

At HMRC we are committed to creating a great place to work for all our colleagues; an inclusive and respectful environment that reflects the diversity of the society we serve.

We want to maximise the potential of everyone who chooses to work for us and we offer a range of flexible working patterns and support to make a fulfilling career at HMRC accessible to you.

Diverse perspectives and experiences are critical to our success and we welcome applications from all people from all backgrounds with the experience and skills needed to perform this role.

At HMRC, we are already one of the most digital organisations in the UK. We have one of the largest data sources, and we're creating a world-class IT function. HMRC is building a modern, digital tax administration.

With 50 million customers to serve, over 60 thousand colleagues to support, and £600 billion to collect to fund UK Plc, our IT operation is huge. Operating at this level isn't for everyone, but those ready for the challenge will find unique opportunities to work with advanced technologies and create lasting impact.
Chief Digital and Information Office (CDIO) set the technology direction for HMRC and deliver the high-level design for all IT solutions.

We are responsible for building and running HMRC IT services along with providing IT change and operational support.

The Borders and Trade Delivery Group are responsible for the end to end service management and development of over 140 separate services, from the generation of Trade Statistics, to the administration of Customs and Excise duties.

This is an exciting role as a key member of the delivery team, collaborating with partners throughout the full delivery lifecycle to ensure delivery and support of highest-quality software products.

Our developers work closely with business analysts, testers and product owners within a truly collaborative environment.

Job description

As Lead Developer in HMRC, you will be responsible for setting technical direction, and ensuring the delivery of high-quality, scalable, and secure services.

You will guide and support a fast paced engineering team across the full service lifecycle, translating business and user needs into coherent technical designs, acting as an application architect, balancing strategic alignment with practical delivery, and remaining sufficiently hands-on to validate designs through prototypes or reference implementations.

You will lead low level solution design of complex large scale services and create corresponding documents and architectural diagrams. You must be proficient in a wide range of technical systems, and in identifying appropriate technology and approaches.

Alongside functional change, you would lead solution design to meet non-functional requirements such as resilience, performance, scalability and observability.

You will lead delivery of high quality software that meets user needs, and be responsible for overseeing the development of clean, secure code following a test-driven approach.

Key responsibilities

• Set technical strategy and direction, ensuring architectural decisions, tooling choices and design approaches support scalable, secure, high‑quality services.
• Provide expert judgement and act as the escalation point for complex or high‑risk technical issues, guiding teams towards robust solutions.
• Act as a design authority for technical change to the service, ensuring all implementations align to HMRC Enterprise Architecture Patterns.
• Oversee the full lifecycle of build/run/improve, ensuring services remain resilient, compliant and aligned to user and business needs, even when not personally hands‑on.
• Provide leadership to developers, delegating technical work, supporting planning, reviewing solution approaches, and ensuring development is on track and to the expected quality.
• Assure security compliance, embedding secure‑by‑design principles and ensuring risks are understood and mitigated.
• Lead on solution design & technical decision‑making, including reviewing and challenging design choices (e.g., Redis persistence strategies, interface behaviours, microservice consolidation).
• Ensures compliance with performance and design standards, influencing cross‑team technology choices (e.g., SSO, Keycloak, REST template decisions).
• Contribute to the development of robust, accurately estimated, project plans, considering risk and mitigation.
• Critical decision making: Making and recording effective decisions following the appropriate decision-making criteria, framework or guidance.

Person specification

This role will suit an experienced technical leader who combines strong software engineering expertise with a specialism in application architecture and design. You will take ownership of technical direction, translate complex needs into coherent designs, and provide clear leadership throughout the service lifecycle.

• Proactive and self-driven
• Strategic and pragmatic
• Design led
• Strong technical judgement
• Quality and resilience focused
• Leads through influence
• Governance and assurance minded
• Hands on and credible
• Collaborative communicator
• Coaching & Continuous Improvement mindset
• Outcome focused
• Resilient under pressure

Additionally, the post holder will work normal office hours though may be required to occasionally attend the office outside of normal working hours (for example to support software releases). The post holder may be required to provide part of a 24/7 on-call Rota.

Essential Criteria

• Demonstrable experience of producing detailed designs for complex, secure and resilient Java services, and acting as an application architect for enterprise-scale Java solutions
• Strong Java engineering background, sufficient to challenge designs and validate implementation choices. Including the following accompanying technology:
  • REST APIs, Spring (Boot / Cloud / etc), REDIS, Kubernetes, Docker
  • Java Messaging (Kafka / RabbitMQ)
  • Relational and Non-Relational Database technologies (MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB)

• Strong background in transforming high level solution designs into low level detailed implementation designs for enterprise scale, resilient, Java microservices (including design of; APIs, integrations, data flows, security controls, hosted on AWS technologies such as S3, EC2 and EKS)
• Strong knowledge of enterprise scale microservice architecture and cloud native, distributed design patterns
• Experienced in leading developers during advanced problem‑solving during complex integration challenges
• Experienced in a variety of UML diagram techniques including but not limited to sequence diagrams and data flow diagrams
• Experience making and clearly communicating pragmatic technical decisions across multiple teams and stakeholders
• Strong background in stakeholder management, proven collaboration with Business Analysis, Delivery Managers, Product Managers, and Business Repre