Location: London, UK - 5 days a week onsite

I'm partnered with a leading global financial institution that is looking to hire a Backend Developer with Java / Kotlin expertise as a de facto Founding Engineer to help launch a greenfield initiative.

This is an opportunity to join at an early stage and play a key role in designing, building, and scaling a new platform from the ground up, with significant ownership across architecture, engineering, and technical direction.

The successful candidate will have a strong track record of working at significant scale, building distributed systems that support a large number of end users and operate reliably in complex, high-availability environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and build at scale — design highly scalable, distributed systems capable of supporting a large and growing user base.


• Own the engineering from the ground up — make high-impact decisions around architecture, technology, and technical direction.


• Build for resilience — engineer systems that are fault-tolerant, secure, highly available, and built to perform under pressure.


• Solve genuinely hard engineering problems — identify performance bottlenecks, tackle complex production issues, and continuously improve the platform.


• Raise the engineering bar — champion modern technologies, pragmatic design patterns, and best practices across the development lifecycle.


• Ideal opportunity for an engineer who wants genuine 0→1 ownership.

What We're Looking For

• Strong backend engineering experience with Java and/or Kotlin, building production-grade systems.


• Proven experience working at significant scale, building platforms used by a large number of end users.


• Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, reliability, and system design.


• A pragmatic, high-ownership mindset — comfortable making decisions, navigating ambiguity, and solving complex problems.


• A team-first engineer who shares knowledge, maintains high standards, and helps raise the technical bar around them.