DevX POD Lead (Kotlin/Java)

• Provide day-to-day technical leadership for an agile engineering team, supporting the overall Tech Lead to deliver outcomes at pace and with quality.
• Lead technical input into backlog refinement by breaking epics and features into well-defined user stories, clarifying acceptance criteria, identifying dependencies, and ensuring work is delivery ready.
• Support sprint planning by shaping technical approaches, identifying spikes, and helping the team size work appropriately.
• Design, develop, and implement primarily back-end features, including Kotlin/Java APIs and services, with a small element of UI work using a simple UI framework.
• Build and evolve APIs and microservices, applying consistent engineering patterns such as error handling, logging, resilience, and security by design.
• Contribute to and support architectural and design decisions with the Tech Lead, documenting key decisions and trade-offs where needed.
• Design, build, and deliver an in-house solution end to end from shaping the initial idea and requirements through development, testing, and ongoing support.
• Coach and uplift the team in development best practice, including clean code, test-driven development, secure coding, and maintainable design.
• Drive effective peer reviews and engineering standards, ensuring code quality, readability, and attention to detail.
• Work in an agile CI/CD environment to deliver rapid iterations at a sustainable velocity, promoting automation and quality gates.
• Collaborate with developers, testers, and the wider organisation to build, run, and improve products.
• Proactively engage with customers and users to resolve issues, respond to feature requests, and reduce recurring operational pain.

Technologies:

• API
• CI/CD
• Confluence
• GitHub
• Support
• JIRA
• Java
• JavaScript
• Kafka
• Kotlin
• SQL
• Security
• microservices
• UX UI Design
• BitBucket
• REST
• TDD

More:

We are offering a hybrid role based in Sheffield, with 60% office and 40% remote working. This is a contract opportunity running until 30/11/2026, with a rate of £529 and PAYE through umbrella required. We are looking for a DevX POD Lead to join our agile engineering team and provide technical leadership while working closely with the Tech Lead, developers, testers, and the wider organisation to deliver high-quality outcomes at pace. We value proactive ownership, strong collaboration, and a focus on quality, automation, and continuous improvement.

• Strong Kotlin experience, or significant Java experience with a willingness to learn Kotlin.
• Experience leading or acting as a senior engineer within an agile delivery team at squad level.
• Proven ability to refine and decompose work into implementable stories, manage dependencies, and remove technical blockers.
• Strong experience in microservices and API development, and asynchronous messaging technologies such as Kafka or similar event-driven platforms.
• Experience in at least two or three of the following: API development, SQL/databases, HTML/JavaScript.
• Strong technical and analytical troubleshooting skills, including a production support mindset.
• Experience with standard developer collaboration tools such as GitHub, Jira, and Confluence.
• Excellent written and spoken English, with the ability to communicate technical decisions clearly.
• Good interpersonal skills and a collaborative approach to working across engineering, testing, product, and control owners.