Java Engineering Lead / Principal

Location: Farringdon, London (Hybrid) Contract Type: Permanent

About Us

Toyota Connected Europe strives to create a better world through connected mobility for all. We bring together big data and a customer-centric approach to enhance every step of the mobility experience—making it more personalised, convenient, fun, and safe. Our technologies empower millions of users to engage with our products and services in innovative ways.

You’ll join us at the inception of Toyota Connected Europe’s growth, shaping team dynamics and product development from the ground up. This is a chance to leave an immediate, tangible impact—your contributions will be visible and influential right from the start.

We foster a start-up culture within Toyota’s structure, encouraging every team member to act as an owner, think independently, and drive creative solutions. Your work today will directly influence the experiences of users tomorrow.

About the Role

We seek an **experienced Engineering Lead to build core team capabilities and lead the design, development, implementation, and documentation of large-scale, distributed software applications, systems, and services. Your focus will be on enabling vehicle-to-cloud connectivity, ensuring the products you develop deliver seamless, global driving experiences.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and champion engineering principles, practices, standards, and technologies to deliver high-quality, robust, and secure software solutions.
• Collaborate closely with product and stakeholders to solve complex business problems, shape features, and drive the product roadmap with creativity and autonomy.
• Tech lead ownership across all stages of software development, including:
  • Planning, adopting, and refining software development methods, tools, and techniques.
  • Ensuring adherence to software standards (including security) and contributing to policies, guidelines, and best practices.
• Architect and design large or complex systems:
  • Conduct impact analysis on major design choices and trade-offs, balancing functional and non-functional requirements.
  • Apply and adapt system design methods, tools, and techniques while mitigating risks.
• Project leadership: Drive systems development, select appropriate methodologies, and align projects with organisational goals.
  • Manage resource allocation and ensure adherence to agreed architectures, standards, and security/privacy requirements.
• Transform systems integration by:
  • Advancing automation and continuous integration capabilities.
  • Evaluating, adopting, and managing tools to build a resilient integration framework.
  • Leading integration work in line with system/design roadmaps and proactively mitigating risks.
• Continuous improvement:
  • Identify new capability gaps in the organisation, prioritise opportunities, gather buy-in, and establish measurable impact plans.
• Support professional development in your field by:
  • Aligning training needs with organisational priorities, learning strategies, and career pathways.
  • Assisting in creating development plans that support individual growth.
• Foster a collaborative, agile engineering environment:
  • Work alongside peer lead engineers, driving engineering maturity and strong team culture.
• Ensure end-to-end service delivery—from concept to code to production, focusing on availability, reliability, robustness, and quality.
• Champion operational excellence by collaborating with Product, Quality, Delivery, and Operations teams to:
  • Drive NFR (Non-Functional Requirements), observability, and key performance metric visibility.
• Team leadership:
  • Manage direct reports, provide mentorship, and coaching, and drive best practices through:
    • Knowledge-sharing, pair programming, code reviews, and constructive feedback.
    • Developing engineering culture and methodologies (e.g., agile, DevSecOps).
• Own the technology strategy and roadmap by defining and evolving engineering capabilities in balance with business goals.