“It feels good to have a career with real purpose.”

Job Title: Lead Software Developer

Contract Type: Permanent 
Location: Alderley Edge 
Working style: Hybrid – 50% home/office based 
Closing Date: 23rd March 2026

About the Role 

Royal London are seeking an expertly skilled and experienced Lead Software Engineer to join our Data & Integration area within CTO, working on our Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) initiative. 

iPaaS is a modern, cloudcentric integration platform that provides reusable capabilities in the form of patterns, standards and reference architectures to enable teams adopting our integration services to deliver at pace in a scalable and secure way. We are a centre for enablement “We enable, you build”—our platform team creates and operates core capabilities, while product & value stream teams consume published patterns and collaborate to evolve them. 

The successful candidate will join one of our squads developing new capabilities and improvements where you will play a lead role in building and operating integration solutions for our customers and business users.

About you 

You’ll be a hands-on engineering leader with a platform mindset—someone who enjoys enabling other teams through well engineered, reusable capabilities and strong operational standards. 

Essential skills and experience: 

• Strong engineering background and experience leading delivery across the full software development lifecycle 

• Experience designing and implementing modern integration solutions aligned to event and API first patterns 

• Cloud engineering experience, with the ability to deploy and operate services on scalable, cloud centric infrastructure 

• Proven capability with Infrastructure as Code, including Terraform for provisioning and managing platform resources 

• Working knowledge of event streaming / event broker concepts and operating models (e.g., topics, schemas, environment level controls) 

• Proficient in CI/CD and DevOps practices, using pipelines and automation to deliver safely and repeatedly 

• Strong focus on operability: monitoring/observability, resilience, security and service readiness as part of delivery 

• Thrives under little to no supervision 

• An experienced development lead and mentor 

• Continuously developing new skills, driving best practice and emerging technology adoption 

Nice to have: 

• Experience working with centrally curated patterns/standards, reference architectures and guardrails that enable federated delivery teams, in particular with Confluent Kafka 

• Experience with API management as part of a wider integration ecosystem, in particular with Azure APIM 

About the Opportunity 

In this role, you will be the Lead Software Engineer, where you will help us on our journey developing iPaaS capabilities by: 

• Designing, building and maintaining platform capabilities that enable teams to deliver integration services at pace, including reusable patterns, frameworks and implementation assets 

• Supporting the day today running of the platform and related services, ensuring deployed services are resilient, compliant and secure 

• Responding to incidents and requests, ensuring we manage our services within SLA 

• Deploying new cloud services and infrastructure via CI/CD pipelines, in a resilient, cost effective fashion 

• Using Terraform and approved patterns to provision and manage platform environments consistently 

• Leading the design and development of complex solutions, and carrying out impact assessments of complex changes 

• Ensuring documentation and agreed designs are produced in advance and to agreed standards, and that quality gates are met 

• Working closely with Architects, Testers, Engineers, Analysts and Stakeholders to deliver high quality solutions 

• Contributing to and leading software development practice by sharing ideas and experience 

• Developing our people & capabilities

We recognise 

We recognise that no candidate will meet every single requirement listed, and we warmly encourage you to apply regardless. We’re committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace, and your unique experiences and perspective could be a valuable addition to our team. 

About Royal London 

We’re the UK’s largest mutual life, pensions and investment company, offering protection, long-term savings and asset management products and services. 

Our People Promise to our colleagues is that we will all work somewhere inclusive, responsible, enjoyable and fulfilling. This is underpinned by our Spirit of Royal London values; Empowered, Trustworthy, Collaborate, Achieve. 

We've always been proud to reward employees by offering great workplace benefits such as 28 days annual leave in addition to bank holidays, an up to 14% employer matching pension scheme and private medical insurance. You can see all our benefits here – Our Benefits.

Inclusion, diversity and belonging 

We’re an Inclusive employer. We celebrate and value different backgrounds and cultures across Royal London. Our diverse people and perspectives give us a range of skills which are recognised and respected – whatever their background.