Staff / Lead Software Engineer - Backend Platform

Behind every investment is a person with ambitions, motivations and values. While we know that every client is unique, they come to J.P. Morgan Personal Investing for the same reason: our straightforward and transparent approach to investing, and the trust that 150 years of J.P. Morgan heritage brings. 

J.P. Morgan Personal Investing offers award-winning investments, products and digital wealth management services to almost 300,000 investors in the UK. We built the business with innovation as a core part of our ethos to give consumers the confidence and clarity to make informed investment decisions and achieve their financial goals.

As a Senior Lead Software Engineer at JPMorgan Chase within J.P. Morgan Personal Investing, you will be a highly skilled hands-on Backend Engineer for the Platform team dedicated to building a Spring Boot based framework and robust libraries that support our product engineering teams.

This role combines deep technical expertise in Java and the Spring ecosystem, with strong problem-solving abilities. You will work closely with SDLC and Infrastructure teams and play a pivotal role in driving standardization and promoting best practices across Investments' technology landscape.

Job responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain backend libraries and frameworks using Java and Spring Boot, tailored to the needs of asynchronous architecture that powers the Investments' ecosystem. 
• Build scalable, reliable, and secure components that provide out of the box implementations of non-functional requirements and controls compliance and accelerate feature delivery for product engineering teams. 
• Collaborate closely with product engineering teams to understand their needs and deliver solutions that improve their productivity and engineering experience. 
• Drive initiatives to standardise development workflows, tooling, and processes across Platform and Product squads. 
• Champion the adoption of engineering best practices, coding standards, and architectural guidelines across Investments' and JP Morgan’s broader technology organisation. 
• Providing technical direction, mentorship, and fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement. 
• Tackle complex technical challenges, design innovative strategic solutions and provide guidance to the team. 
• Facilitate knowledge sharing and skill development within the team. 
• Close collaboration with SDLC and Infrastructure teams to enable delivery of Platform as a Product 
• Drives adoption and governance of approved AI-assisted engineering practices across teams to improve code quality, delivery speed, and operational outcomes (e.g., AI-assisted code review/refactoring, test acceleration, release readiness, incident/root-cause analysis), while establishing measurable validation standards (secure coding, peer review, automated testing) and promoting reuse of proven patterns and automation within the SDLC/TLM toolchain
• Applies knowledge of tools within the Software Development Life Cycle toolchain, including approved AI-assisted development and automation capabilities, to improve the value realized by automation at scale

Required qualifications, capabilities, and skills

• Strong proficiency in Java and Spring Boot framework 
• Experience with managing build tools such as Maven and Gradle and their role in SDLC standardisation. 
• Solid understanding of software engineering principles, design patterns, and best practices. 
• A champion of security best practices in backend development. 
• Experience with designing modern APIs, micro-service architectures, and distributed asynchronous systems with high level of complexity 
• Excellent communication, mentoring, and stakeholder management skills. 
• Ability to drive change and influence technical direction across teams. 
• Understanding the needs of engineering teams 
• Passion for driving standardisation, process improvement, and engineering excellence. 
• Experience implementing and enforcing coding standards, code reviews, and automated testing. 
• Understanding importance of controls and compliance in regulated organisations.
• Demonstrated experience leading effective use of enterprise-authorized AI-assisted software development tools within the work environment (e.g., for coding, code review, test acceleration, troubleshooting) with the ability to set team expectations for validating AI outputs for correctness, performance, and security.
• Strong understanding of responsible AI use in engineering workflows, including data sensitivity considerations, secure handling of inputs/outputs, and adherence to resiliency and security expectations; experience coaching senior engineers/leads on compliant usage patterns and controls.

Preferred qualifications, capabilities, and skills 

• Experience with building backend libraries and frameworks that were shared across multiple teams and deep understanding of Spring Boot framework internals 
• Experience with other scripting languages (e.g. Python, Groovy, Bash) and IaC tools (e.g. Terraform). 
• Knowledge of observability tools (e.g. OTEL, Grafana, Dynatrace etc). 
• Experience working in financial services, investment platforms, or similar regulated organisations. 
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining CI/CD platforms (e.g. Jenkins, GitHub Actions). 
• Experience with building self-serve tooling for engineering teams. 
• Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams, sprint planning and backlog grooming,