POD Lead (Kotlin/Java)

Job Title: POD Lead (Kotlin/Java) Location: Sheffield 3x a week Salary/Rate: £515 Daily Start Date: 13/07/26 Job Type: Initial 6 month contract Inside IR35 Company Introduction We have an exciting opportunity now available with one of our sector-leading financial clients! They are currently looking for a skilled POD lead to join their team for an initial six-month contract. About the project: • 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: break epics/features into well-defined user stories, clarify acceptance criteria, identify dependencies, and ensure 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 (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 (error handling, logging, resilience, security-by-design). • Contribute to and support architectural and design decisions with the Tech Lead, documenting key decisions and trade-offs where needed. • Be capable of designing, building and delivering 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: 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. Skills & experience we require: • 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 (squad-level technical leadership). • Proven ability to refine and decompose work (features 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 production support mindset. • Experience with standard developer collaboration tools: GitHub/Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence. • Excellent written and spoken English, with the ability to communicate technical decisions clearly. • Good interpersonal skills and a collaborative approach to working across roles (engineering, testing, product, control owners).