Staff Engineer | Backend

Legal & General supports the savings, protection and retirement needs of around 14 million people, through our portfolio of retail and workplace businesses.

Our Retail division helps people enjoy a more colourful retirement, both directly and through their employers, including Lifetime Mortgages, Retirement Interest Only Mortgages and financial advice on our range of lending products.

We are the UK’s number one individual life insurer, and also provide Group Protection products for employers – all helping people to plan for the unexpected. We support home buying through our Mortgage Club – the UK’s largest – and our award-winning Surveying Services team. And our fintech team finds and supports socially useful start-ups and scale-ups working in the workplace, home, insurance and wealth areas.

Joining us means helping create brighter financial futures for all our customers.

We have an exciting new opportunity for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our expanding software development team. In this pivotal role, the Backend Engineer will leverage extensive skills and experience to lead and mentor a team of highly talented engineers. With exceptional technical expertise, the Staff Engineer will drive the team's projects to successful completion. This role is crucial in ensuring the team's success, shaping the strategic vision of application design, and identifying opportunities to standardise approaches across adjacent teams.

What you'll be doing:

• Spearheading the development of scalable, secure, and well-architected products and platforms, ensuring we deliver exceptional outcomes to our customers efficiently
• Acting as a multi-faceted leader by leveraging influence, technical expertise, and organisational authority to align with the long-term goals of the organisation
• Engaging in applied engineering by transforming strategic direction into tangible technology and viable engineering approaches. Ensuring solutions are fit for purpose, provide business value, adhere to quality standards, and align with standard engineering practices and L&G SSDLC policies
• Overseeing technical work across multiple development teams to reduce duplication, enhance collaboration, and provide clarity on progress, ensuring smooth delivery of cross-cutting concerns
• Partnering with and enabling engineering leaders to fulfill the division's strategic direction. Mentoring engineers to help them grow in their technical responsibilities and remove blockers to their independence
• Conducting research on relevant technologies and identify opportunities to incorporate them as appropriate. Applying knowledge of technology options and survey the external market landscape for insights, direction, and vendors to keep our applications up-to-date, relevant, and efficient, delivering value to the business and end-users.
• Addressing technical blockers and identify process improvements within your domain. Actively seeking out and resolving impediments to team efficiency ("technical debt"), proposing and implementing solutions to enable faster iteration.
• Guiding and collaborating with the Developer Community to define software development standards that meet security, compliance, and audit requirements without hindering the software development process.

Who we're looking for:

• Backend Staff Engineer, with technical knowledge of:
  • Java Springboot 
  • Software testing frameworks and strategies is essential
  • CI/CD and associated release strategies is essential
  • Secure development strategies is essential
  • Microservices patterns/ framework
  • AWS
• Experience in contributing and influencing technical direction is essential
• Experience in setting technical direction and providing effective engineering perspectives
• Experience of guiding, coaching and mentoring colleagues is essential

Whatever your role, we reward performance and behaviour with a package that looks after all the things that are important to you. Here are some of the benefits we offer: 

• The opportunity to participate in our annual, performance-related bonus plan and valuable share schemes  
• Generous pension contribution  
• Life assurance   
• Private medical insurance (permanent employees only) 
• At least 25 days holiday, plus public holidays, 26 days after 2 years’ service. There’s also the option to buy and sell holiday 
• Competitive family leave 
• Participate in our electric car scheme, which offers employees the option to hire a brand-new electric car through tax efficient salary sacrifice (permanent employees only)
• There are the many discounts we offer – both for our own products and at a range of high street stores and online   
• In 2023, some of our workspaces were redesigned. Our offices are great spaces to connect and collaborate and have your wellbeing at the heart

At L&G, we believe it's possible to generate positive returns today while helping to build a better future for all. 

If you join us, you’ll be part of a welcoming, inclusive culture, with opportunities to collaborate with people of diverse backgrounds, views, and experiences. Guided by leaders with integrity who care about your future and wellbeing. Empowered through initiatives which support people to develop their careers and excel.

We care passionately about outcomes rather than attendance and are therefore open to discussing all kinds of flexible working options including part-time, term-time and job shares. Although some roles have limited flexibility due to customer demand, we accommodate requests when we can. 

It doesn’t matter if you don’t meet every single criterion in this advert. Instead, think about what you excel at and what else you can bring in terms of strengths, potential and connection to our purpose.