Technical Lead

Tech Lead – Payments (Fintech) London | Hybrid (1–2 day onsite p/w) We are hiring a hands‑on Tech Lead to join one of the core engineering teams at this Global Fintech organisation, working on a high‑scale, cloud‑native platform for cross‑border payments and global money movement. This role blends technical leadership, deep engineering involvement, and quality ownership. You will collaborate closely with backend engineers, QA automation specialists, product stakeholders, and architects to deliver reliable, scalable systems in a regulated fintech environment. Key Responsibilities • Own services, architecture decisions, and testing strategy • Lead and mentor backend and QA automation engineers • Drive high‑quality automated testing across API, integration, and event‑driven systems • Ensure automated tests are fully embedded within CI/CD pipelines • Partner with Product and Architecture on solution design and trade‑offs • Promote best practices around testability, observability, and reliability • Support event‑driven and distributed systems • Participate in architectural discussions, technical reviews, and incident analysis Mandatory Experience • Strong commercial Java experience • API automation in Java (RestAssured or similar) • Test integration within CI/CD pipelines • Solid SQL and relational database knowledge • Testing event‑driven architectures (Kafka preferred) • Experience with Docker and AWS • Hands‑on with mocking tools (WireMock preferred) • 5+ years in QA Automation within complex, distributed systems Nice to Have • Kubernetes • Contract testing (Pact) • Observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, Kibana) • Experience in fintech, payments, or regulated environments • Exposure to microservices and distributed systems