Java Tech Lead

Job Title: Java Tech Lead - FS Industry
Location: London - 1 or 2 days per week in the office
Salary/Rate: £455 per day inside IR35
Start Date: 09/02/2026
Job Type: Contract - 1 year

Company Introduction

This role combines technical leadership, hands-on engineering, and quality ownership. The Tech Lead will work closely with backend engineers, QA automation engineers, and product stakeholders to ensure high engineering standards, system reliability, and scalable solutions in a regulated financial environment.
We are looking for someone comfortable acting as a technical authority, not just a delivery coordinator.

Job Responsibilities/Objectives

• Take technical ownership of services and testing strategy within the team
• Lead and mentor engineers across backend and QA automation areas
• Design and enforce high-quality automated testing strategies (API, integration, event-driven systems)
• Ensure test automation is fully integrated into CI/CD pipelines
• Act as a technical partner for Product Owners and Architects, contributing to solution design and trade-offs
• Drive best practices around testability, observability, and reliability
• Support teams working with event-driven and distributed architectures
• Participate in architectural discussions, technical reviews, and incident analysis
• Ensure compliance with fintech quality, stability, and security standards

Required Skills/Experience
The ideal candidate will have the following:

• Strong commercial experience with Java
• Hands-on experience with API automation in Java (RestAssured or equivalent)
• Proven experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines
• Solid understanding of SQL and relational databases
• Experience testing event-driven architectures and messaging systems (Kafka preferred, similar technologies acceptable)
• Experience working with Docker and AWS-based environments
• Practical experience with mocking tools (preferably WireMock)
• Strong experience in QA Automation, ideally in complex, distributed systems

Desirable Skills/Experience
Although not essential, the following skills are desired by the client:

• Kubernetes (hands-on or working knowledge)
• Contract Testing (e.g. Pact)
• Observability and monitoring tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, or Kibana
• Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated environments
• Exposure to microservices and distributed systems design

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply now with your updated CV in Microsoft Word/PDF format.

Disclaimer
Notwithstanding any guidelines given to level of experience sought, we will consider candidates from outside this range if they can demonstrate the necessary competencies.
Square One is acting as both an employment agency and an employment business, and is an equal opportunities recruitment business. Square One embraces diversity and will treat everyone equally. Please see our website for our full diversity statement.