Principal Java Engineer

Senior Java Engineer

This role sits within our Risk Intelligence division, an area responsible for delivering critical services that support anti-money laundering and financial crime prevention across global markets.

We're looking for a Senior Java Engineer to join our growing Nottingham-based engineering team. This is a hands-on role for a Java expert who enjoys building high-quality backend systems, shaping technical direction, and working with modern, message and event-driven architectures.

You'll play a key role in designing, building and evolving core services, working closely with other senior engineers and architects. While you'll have influence over technical decisions, this role is firmly rooted in delivery — ideal for someone who loves writing code, solving complex problems, and continuously raising engineering standards.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Hands-On Engineering: Designing, developing and maintaining high-performance Java services that are scalable, secure and resilient.
• Modern Backend Design: Applying Domain-Driven Design and message-/event-driven design principles to build loosely coupled, well-structured systems.
• Code Quality & Craftsmanship: Writing clean, maintainable code and contributing to peer reviews, championing best practices and continuous improvement.
• System Evolution: Helping modernise and evolve existing platforms, balancing pragmatic delivery with long-term architectural health.
• Collaboration: Working closely with product managers, architects and fellow engineers to turn complex business requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Developer Experience: Contributing to improvements in build tooling, CI/CD pipelines, testing approaches and overall engineering productivity.
• Operational Excellence: Supporting systems in production, improving observability, performance and resilience.

What You'll Bring:

• Strong Java Expertise: Proven experience building backend systems using Java and frameworks such as Spring / Spring Boot, with deep understanding of the JVM ecosystem.
• Event & Message-Driven Design: Experience designing systems using messaging and event-driven approaches (e.g. Kafka or similar technologies), with a solid grounding in Domain-Driven Design.
• Engineering Fundamentals: Strong grasp of SOLID principles, design patterns, dependency injection and persistence technologies (JPA/Hibernate).
• Problem-Solving Mindset: Solid knowledge of algorithms and data structures, with the ability to reason about performance, complexity and scalability.
• Data Awareness: Experience working with both SQL and NoSQL data stores, understanding query patterns, indexing strategies and trade-offs.
• Cloud-Ready Development: Experience building software for cloud environments, including containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes) and modern deployment practices.
• Quality & Resilience Focus: Understanding of secure coding practices, fault tolerance and building reliable systems in distributed environments.
• Collaboration & Influence: Comfortable working with other engineers, sharing ideas clearly and contributing positively to team discussions.

Preferred Skills / Experience:

• Experience with reactive or asynchronous programming models.
• Exposure to API technologies such as GraphQL, gRPC or API gateway patterns.
• Interest or experience in AI-assisted development or agent-based frameworks (e.g. LangChain4j or similar).
• Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, or a strong interest in staying current with the Java ecosystem.

What You'll Get In Return:

Nottingham is one of LSEG's established UK technology hubs, bringing together experienced software engineers, architects and product teams working on globally critical platforms. For engineers considering relocation, Nottingham offers a compelling alternative to London — combining challenging, large-scale technical work with a lower cost of living, shorter commutes and a strong quality of life.

The city has a growing technology ecosystem, excellent rail links to London, Birmingham and Manchester, and is well suited to engineers looking to stay close to hands-on development while influencing complex systems used across global financial markets.

This role follows a hybrid working model, with three days per week in our Nottingham office. Office days are intentionally collaborative — focused on design sessions, problem-solving and peer learning — while still providing flexibility for remote working and deep focus.