VP Lead Engineer

Embark on a transformative journey as a VP Lead Engineer . At Barclays, our vision is clear — to redefine the future of banking and craft innovative solutions. In this role, you will support OMNI—a strategic, enterprise‑wide, real‑time transaction lineage platform that delivers end‑to‑end visibility into transaction lifecycles across payments, trade, lending, reference data, and related systems. OMNI consolidates fragmented event data from numerous transactional and supporting platforms into a unified, near real‑time view, enabling faster incident resolution, precise client impact assessment, improved reconciliation, and AI‑driven insights for operations, client teams, and product partners.

To be successful as a VP Lead Engineer, you should have:

• Demonstrated leadership in architecting and delivering large‑scale, distributed, event‑driven backend systems, with clear ownership for reliability, scalability, throughput, and low‑latency guarantees

• Proven ability to own and drive end‑to‑end architecture for real‑time and near‑real‑time streaming platforms, using Apache Kafka as the core event backbone, and setting standards for topic design, contracts, and integration patterns

• Deep, hands‑on expertise with Kafka Streams and Apache Flink, including stateful stream processing, event‑time handling, exactly‑once semantics, and operational considerations such as reprocessing, upgrades, and failure recovery

• Considerable engineering depth in a modern, strongly‑typed language (e.g., Java/Scala), with a consistent history of high‑quality production code, automated testing, and pragmatic design trade‑offs

• Expert‑level understanding of messaging and streaming architectures, including partitioning strategies, consumer group design, parallelism, back‑pressure management, fault tolerance, and capacity planning

Other highly valued skills include:

• Experience designing enterprise‑grade streaming and analytical data models, with a focus on schema evolution, backward/forward compatibility, and long‑term maintainability across platforms such as Snowflake

• Exposure to financial or high‑integrity data domains, including complex structured formats and the challenges of high‑volume transformation, enrichment, and validation at scale

• A history of defining and enforcing technical standards, reference architectures, and best practices across multiple teams working on Kafka/Flink‑based platforms

• Advanced production ownership and troubleshooting skills, including latency analysis, streaming performance tuning, resilience engineering, and operational stability for 24x7 systems

• Ability to lead by example, mentor engineers, run effective design and code reviews, and influence technical direction across squads without direct authority

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in this role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen, strategic thinking, digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

This role is located in our Whippany, New Jersey office.

Minimum Salary: $170,000

Maximum Salary: $230,000

The minimum and maximum salary/rate information above include only base salary or base hourly rate. It does not include any other type of compensation or benefits that may be available.

Barclays employees are eligible for a suite of competitive and generous employee benefits, including medical, dental and vision coverage, 401(k), life insurance, and other paid leave for qualifying circumstances.

This position is eligible for an incentive award.

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.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People 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..
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

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.