Bank of England
Java Engineer (Core Settlement), RTGS Technology
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Java Engineer (Core Settlement), RTGS Technology
Location: Leeds
Job Description
This is an opportunity to take a senior engineering role inside one of the UK’s most critical technology environments.
RTGS settles on average £800bn per day and is Critical National Infrastructure. The Core Settlement team owns the software at the heart of that service - including the core settlement engine and the services responsible for transaction processing, settlement behaviour, and financial state across RTGS.
As a Java Engineer in the Core Settlement team, you will build, operate, and continuously improve the Java services that underpin RTGS settlement. You will work independently on meaningful pieces of work, take clear ownership of what you deliver, and be expected to bring your own engineering judgement to the problems in front of you.
This team follows a “you build it, you own it model”. You are responsible not just for delivering software, but for how it performs in production - diagnosing issues, restoring service, and turning operational learning into engineering improvements.
Flexible Working Options
This role is open to flexible working patterns, which may include:
- Flexible start and end times to each day
- A 50% in-office attendance requirement that can be spread across the month, with flexibility to reflect operational commitments such as on-call activity
- There will be some occasional out-of-hours activity to support production releases and change testing, which may include limited weekend or non-core hours working
- Working from abroad (subject to approval)
Opportunities in Leeds:
We’re excited to be growing our presence in Leeds, a city we’ve been connected to for nearly 200 years! Our modern, accessible office in the City Centre offers a supportive, flexible working environment. The majority of roles, including this one, are now available in Leeds, giving you the chance to build a meaningful career outside of London while contributing to our mission from a dynamic and growing location. You’ll work collaboratively with London-based colleagues in a hybrid model, with regular opportunities to travel into the London office to meet and connect together in person.
A day in the role:
Your day might begin with the team stand-up - reviewing priorities, surfacing blockers, and agreeing what the team focuses on next.
Most of your day will be writing Java - implementing a change to the settlement engine, fixing a defect in transaction processing, or improving how a service handles failure and recovers. You will be writing tests alongside the code, not as a separate step.
You will contribute to code reviews on both sides - giving considered, useful feedback on others’ work and engaging constructively with feedback on your own. At this level, code review is a place where you add value, not just receive it.
When something goes wrong in production, you will be part of the response - diagnosing issues, supporting service restoration, and making sure the underlying problem is properly addressed. You bring enough experience to engage meaningfully, not just observe.
This role includes participation in an on-call rota. When on call, you are part of the team responsible for the services in production - responding to incidents, supporting diagnosis and recovery, and making sure lessons learned feed back into the codebase.
In addition, you will support planned change activity outside of core hours where required, including release deployment and testing, to meet the needs of a high-availability service.
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Role Requirements:
As a Java Engineer in the Core Settlement team, you will be an active contributor responsible for delivering and operating core application services.
You will:
- Build and operate Java-based settlement services, taking ownership of the work you pick up and seeing it through from implementation to production
- Write clean, well-tested code - with unit, integration, and component tests as a natural part of delivery, not an afterthought
- Take part in code reviews - contributing feedback and applying the same discipline to your own code
- Engage with solution designs and technical direction, applying your own engineering judgement to implementation and raising concerns before they become problems
- Support production services - participating in on-call, helping to diagnose and resolve incidents, and ensuring issues lead to real improvements
- Develop your understanding of how the services you work on behave under load, failure, and recovery scenarios
- Work within change management and governance processes appropriate for a regulated, high-availability environment
- Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement within the team
Minimum Criteria
We are looking for someone who has the following key skills and experience:
- Good Java engineering experience building and supporting backend services
- Experience working with relational databases (e.g. Oracle, PL/SQL)
- Experience with distributed systems, service-to-service interactions or event-driven patterns (e.g. Kafka)
- Familiarity with container platforms (e.g. OpenShift)
- Experience working with live systems, including troubleshooting and debugging issues
- A solid testing discipline (unit and integration testing)
- Understanding of how software behaves in production (failure modes, recovery, operational risk)
Essential Criteria
We are interested in hearing from candidates who demonstrate the following:
- Experience building and supporting backend Java services in a team environment
- Experience contributing to the design and implementation of service-based systems
- Experience supporting production systems, including participation in incident response
- Understanding of performance considerations in Java services (latency, throughput, memory, concurrency)
- Practical awareness of secure coding practices
- Ability to work closely with engineers, designers and stakeholders
- A track record of delivering code into production and supporting it over time
- High levels of integrity, organisation and self-motivation, with a desire for self-improvement
- Typically 3–5 years’ experience working with backend Java services
Desirable Criteria
It would also be beneficial, though not essential, to have some of the following:
- Frontend technologies (e.g. React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS)
- Messaging and streaming platforms (e.g. Kafka) beyond basic familiarity
- Testing frameworks and approaches (e.g. Jest, service-based testing)
- Build and tooling (e.g. Gradle, Jenkins, Git/GitHub)
- Experience with Oracle database-backed applications
- Experience working in Agile environments (e.g. SAFe)
- Financial services, payments, settlement systems, or other regulated / high-availability environments
Don’t hesitate to apply if you don’t meet all of the criteria. We value diverse perspectives and believe different experiences lead to stronger teams and better outcomes.
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How this role fits into the wider Bank:
RTGS Technology is moving to a product engineering model, with teams aligned to business and platform domains. The Core Settlement team sits at the heart of that model, owning the services responsible for settlement processing, settlement logic and transaction lifecycle execution within RTGS.
As a Java Engineer in this team, you will contribute directly to the safety, resilience, and correctness of some of the most critical software in the UK financial system. You will work within a delivery team that owns its services end-to-end - from design and build through to live operation - with shared responsibility for what is delivered and how it behaves in production.
You will work alongside experienced engineers, contributing to your area while building deeper technical expertise in highly resilient, large-scale systems. Over time, you will have opportunities to take on greater ownership of components, influence how services evolve, and develop your technical capability within a critical national infrastructure environment.
Our Approach to Inclusion
The Bank values diversity, equity and inclusion. We play a key role in maintaining monetary and financial stability, and to do that effectively, we believe we need a workforce that reflects the society we serve.
At the Bank of England, we want all colleagues to feel valued and respected, so we're working hard to build an inclusive culture which supports people from all backgrounds and communities to be at their best at work. We celebrate all forms of diversity, including (but not limited to) age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, race, religion, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status. We believe that it’s by drawing on different perspectives and experiences that we’ll continue to make the best decisions for the public.
We welcome applications from individuals who work flexibly, including job shares and part time working patterns. We've also partnered with external organisations to support us in making adjustments for candidates and employees in the recruitment process where they're needed.
For most roles where work can be carried out at home, we aim for colleagues to spend half of their time in the office, with a minimum of 40% per month. Subject to that minimum requirement, individuals and managers should work together to find what works best for them, their team and stakeholders.
Finally, we're proud to be a member of the Disability Confident Scheme [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/disability-confident-guidance-for-levels-1-2-and-3/level-2-disability-confident-employer]. If you wish to apply under this scheme, you should check the box in the ‘Candidate Personal Information’ under the ‘Disability Confident Scheme’ section of the application.
Salary and Benefits Information
We encourage flexible working, part time working and job share arrangements. Part time salary and benefits will be on a pro-rated basis as appropriate.
The salary range is £49,360 - £55,530. In addition, we also offer a comprehensive benefits package as detailed below:
- Currently a non-contributory, career average pension giving you a guaranteed retirement benefit of 1/80th of your annual salary for every year worked. There is the option to increase your pension (to 1/65th) or decrease (to 1/105th) in exchange
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