Engineering Lead - BPL

Engineering Lead, Software Platform

The mission

Barclays’ payments acceptance business provides critical infrastructure to the UK economy, processing billions of pounds of payments annually for both small businesses and domestic and international corporate clients.

In April 2025, we announced a long-term partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to grow and transform the payments acceptance business by broadening the range of services offered, enhancing the experience for both existing and prospective clients. Leveraging extensive client relationships and deep experience of UK payments, we will create an environment of continuous innovation - activated by Brookfield’s global private equity expertise in payments, technology, operational transformation and corporate carve-outs - to ensure the business is strategically positioned for long-term growth.

Barclays will invest approximately £400m in the new business, the majority of which will be incurred during the first three years. Performance-linked incentives will drive greater alignment between the partners, underpinning the long-term commitment to the transformation. Barclays and Brookfield will work to create a standalone entity over time, continuing to use the Barclaycard Payments (BPL) brand and acting as the sole payments acceptance services provider to Barclays’ clients for a minimum of ten years. 

For more information on our partnership with Brookfield, please visit Barclays.com.

Our platform & infrastructure team provide the hardened, high-velocity foundations that allow our product teams to ship code to production that moves billions of pounds with total confidence.

About the role

As a Principal Software Engineer for our Platform team, you are both an architect of our engineering principles and a builder of the ground we stand on. This is a high-leverage position where you’ll define how we scale, how we deploy, and how we maintain excellence. You’ll spend your time at the intersection of deep technical strategy and hands-on execution, ensuring our internal systems are as polished as our customer-facing products.

What you’ll be working on

With a ruthless focus on optimising developer experience, you’ll lead on designing, operating, and refining our internal developer platform. Leading the migration toward (or optimisation of) distributed systems, ensuring high availability and low latency.

We need to support a rapidly growing set of product engineering teams in building, shipping, and operating software quickly and safely. It’s imperative we get the ‘height’ of the platform correct: sufficient defaults for the majority of workloads, with escape hatches where teams have a strong reason for deviating.

As members of a highly regulated industry, we hold ourselves to the highest standards when it comes to compliance, controls, and policies. We believe we can meet these standards whilst still enabling engineers to ship multiple times a day: you’ll lead on the creative design and implementation of these control and compliance points within our SDLC in a way which empowers teams, rather than as stop-gates.

We are building the tooling that allows us, and our product teams, to see around corners – providing monitoring, logging, and rapid incident response frameworks and playbooks to teams.

Mentorship: beyond just "code reviews," you’ll be levelling up the entire engineering organization through RFCs, workshops, and fostering internal communities of practice.

What you need

Key Skills

• Extremely pro active, detail oriented Engineering leader
• Significant experience in Director level Engineering Senior leading roles
• A storied history – you’ve spent significant time building complex, scalable systems. You’ve seen things break at scale, and you know how to prevent it
• Mastery of skills – a strong command of cloud, kubernetes, and the broader CNCF ecosystem
• A polyglot mindset – expertise of at least two languages (e.g., Rust, Go, Kotlin) and a "right tool for the job" philosophy
• Product thinking – you treat the platform as a product, with fellow engineers as your customers
• Craft of communication – the ability to bring both technical and non-technical stakeholders on the journey with us, explaining complex technical trade-offs to those who might not know what a "service mesh" is

What success looks like

Success in this role is measured not just by the code you commit, but by the cumulative velocity and confidence of the entire engineering organization. You will know you are succeeding when the "tax" of infrastructure is minimized, and our feature teams can focus entirely on delivering value to our customers.

Ultimately, your success is reflected in the growth of those around you. You will have mentored a new generation of senior and staff engineers, fostering a community of practice that values simplicity and automation. The platform you’ve built will be considered "invisible" in the best way possible: a seamless, reliable foundation that empowers every engineer at the company to do the best work of their careers.

Our guiding principles

Strong opinions, weakly held – approach engineering decisions with objectivity, navigating quickly to the right balance between idealism and pragmatism Automate everything – if you have to do it twice, it should probably be a script. If you do it three times, it’s a feature for the backlog. Everything-as-code. Simplicity is a feature – we prefer boring, reliable tech over the flavor-of-the-week, unless there’s is a compelling reason to trial, pilot, and switch Ownership is absolute – we build it, we run it, we fix it. Ruthless transparency – we share our designs, our failures, and our successes transparently with the entire organisation.

The successful candidate will be based in London.

Our offices are located at 1 Churchill Place and 7 Westferry Circus (new BPL office).

We support a hybrid working pattern with 3 days per week office-based presence

Purpose of the role

To  lead and manage engineering teams, providing technical guidance, mentorship, and support to ensure the delivery of high-quality software solutions, driving technical excellence, fostering a culture of innovation, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to align technical decisions with business objectives. 

Accountabilities

• Lead engineering teams effectively, fostering a collaborative and high-performance culture to achieve project goals and meet organizational objectives.
• Oversee timelines, team allocation, risk management and task prioritization to ensure the successful delivery of solutions within scope, time, and budget.
• Mentor and support team members' professional growth, conduct performance reviews, provide actionable feedback, and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Evaluation and enhancement of engineering processes, tools, and methodologies to increase efficiency, streamline workflows, and optimize team productivity.
• Collaboration with business partners, product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and ensure a cohesive approach to product development.
• Enforcement of technology standards, facilitate peer reviews, and implement robust testing practices to ensure the delivery of high-quality solutions.

Director Expectations

• To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide..
• They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.