Crown Agents Bank is a vastly growing and regulated UK bank that connects emerging and frontier markets to the rest of the world, using FX and payments technology. We are transforming the way payments and FX move through emerging markets, reducing friction so that more money gets to those who need it. Emerging markets payments are usually challenging, expensive, unreliable and opaque. Our solutions help fix these pain points. Ultimately, we connect traditionally hard-to-reach regions to global financial infrastructure, giving access to the best prices and the fastest, most reliable settlement.

FX and cross-border payments are often complex and expensive, especially when operating in emerging markets. Crown Agents Bank (CAB) wraps its deep and trusted relationships and strength of network around innovative digital capabilities, and cross-border transaction banking solutions to enable fintech, corporates, governments, development organisations and banks to move money to, from, and across often hard-to-reach markets.

Crown Agents Bank (CAB) is hiring Lead Technical Managers that are looking to engineer state-of-the-art financial systems.  CAB is currently investing in technology growth and change driven by business growth.  This is leading to new revenue streams and product capabilities including new integrations changes to support greater volume and changes to the platforming in AWS.  This dictates an interesting and varied pipeline of work. 

Successful candidates will be working at the cutting edge of software and financial engineering.  We look for Leaders who demonstrate the ability to collaborate across the organization, seeking to work with other parties to improve the organisation.  Hands on skills coaching teams, mentoring colleagues, recruiting and building teams, showing you have contributed to building an open, vibrant and productive culture.  In addition to this we look for a strong history of technical abilities with a focus on Java ecosystems.  In this role you need in depth technical understanding, hands on when you need to be with examples, pair coding, code review and implementation detail design.  We value highly your ability to navigate technology change and support your team though strong mentoring and leadership techniques.  Inspiring, mentoring, delegation and helping create the very best technology teams who can deliver high quality software is key.  A solid demonstration of how modern systems can be grown, adapted and changed will be required.

You’ll be part of a software engineering team within the FX and cross-border payments business working closely with architects, Business Analysts, and Product Managers.  The teams provide software engineering and product development building out platforms using Java, Kotlin and Python using a range of event processing and message flow technologies.  Microservices hosted in AWS provide a range of interfaces with payments direct to banks or over Swift protocols.  Datastores use PostgreSQL with a React UI.  New technologies, techniques and AWS services will be required as we adapt.

The roles responsibilities :

• Provide strong Leadership understand and communicate our vision to inspire and build technology teams.
• Assist the team in designing and implementing new payment systems.
• Understand guard rails set across the organization and help your team deliver performant and reliable products.
• Consider operational costs, observability, and support capabilities.
• Lead design and architectural discussions.
• Coach the team to improve, seek to establish common strong practices across other teams.
• Help with cross team discussions and support other teams to work with your products.
• Work with and seek to improve technical standards.
• Take a delivery and quality balanced approach.

• 5+Years of experience in software development
• Line Management, Goal setting, end of year review.
• Experience designing and building scalable, high-quality systems focused on distributed and low-latency processing using modern, cloud-native architecture.
• Experience with Java and/or Kotlin and Spring Boot.
• A solid grasp of PostgreSQL or similar relational databases.
• Experience with Event-driven architecture.
• Strong understanding and experience with containerisation, including AWS, ECS and EKS.
• Knowledge of software best practices, like code reviews, Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Integration (CI).
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Useful but not essential:
  • Experience in Web UI/ visualisation technologies like HTML5, JavaScript, and React.js is pos
  • Experience with Python.
  • Knowledge of the Axon framework.
  • Infrastructure deployments using Terraform.

What's on Offer for the Candidate:

• Hybrid working
• Contributory personal pension plan: - Minimum: Employee 2% and Employer 7%. Employer matches contributions in 1% increments to a maximum of: Employee 5% and Employer 10%
• Life Assurance - 4 times annual salary
• Group Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance - this may include cover for partner and or children at company cost. Cover includes Optical, Dental and Audiology
• Discretionary Bonus
• Competitive Annual Leave
• 2 Volunteering Days
• Benefit Hut