Role: Lead Backend Software Engineer
Location: London/Newcastle – Hybrid Office & Home
Who Are We?
mkodo builds world class apps, middleware and digital products in the global lottery, betting, and gaming space.
We have an open, supportive, dynamic culture where talented people are trusted to contribute to the team and company by carrying out their roles in a professional, collaborative, and skilled manner. We value the expertise of our team members and offer opportunities for personal development and career progression within the company.
Acquired in February 2020, by Pollard Banknote Limited (PBL), a major supplier to the global lottery industries, brought mkodo strong financial security, access to resources and clients at a global level.
About the role:
Reporting to a Software Engineering Manager or Head of Engineering, we are seeking a Lead Backend Software Engineer to be the go-to authority for backend engineering, setting the technical vision, guiding architecture, and driving improvements in tools, processes, and delivery practices. You’ll remain hands-on for critical work, but your greatest impact will come from technical leadership, enabling teams to deliver robust, scalable, and secure services.
With a strong foundation in backend technologies, including Java and Spring Boot, and event-driven systems such as Kafka, you’ll influence systems well beyond your own code, ensuring architectural integrity and high engineering standards across multiple teams. You’ll play a pivotal role in aligning technical strategy with business goals and ensuring our backend capabilities are future-ready.
Main responsibilities are:
Technical Leadership
- Define and evolve backend architecture to ensure scalability, maintainability, and performance.
- Set coding standards and champion secure development practices (e.g. OWASP).
- Influence technology choices, frameworks, and tools to support engineering excellence.
- Oversee improvements to CI/CD pipelines, build processes, and operational workflows.
- Can clearly and confidently articulate risk of technical problems to non technical stakeholders (e.g legal, product owner, designer)
- Leads projects and features to good outcomes, ensuring appropriate engineering decisions are made to factor in technical debt, systems design, stability/reliability, monitoring/observability and business need.
Hands-On Guidance
- Contribute to key backend systems when your expertise is needed.
- Review and refine critical code, ensuring alignment with architectural goals and best practices.
- Provide technical oversight for major initiatives, ensuring architectural soundness.
Mentoring & Collaboration
- Coach, mentor, and develop engineers, raising capability across the backend discipline.
- Facilitate design discussions, code reviews, and collaborative problem-solving sessions.
- Build consensus for architectural and technical decisions across teams and stakeholders.
Continuous Improvement
- Identify and proactively resolve technical debt.
- Introduce new backend technologies and approaches that improve reliability and delivery speed.
- Promote engineering practices that support scalable, secure, and maintainable systems.
Community & Advocacy
- Proactively stays up to date with technology trends in their area, and uses this knowledge to contribute thoughts on engineering strategy.
- Share knowledge through presentations, workshops, and internal forums.
- Support recruitment by assessing candidates and promoting a strong engineering culture.
- Ensure backend systems comply with relevant standards such as ISO27001 and PCI.
Key Skills & Attributes:
- Strong backend engineering experience, ideally including Java (Java 11+) and Spring Boot.
- Proven ability to design and lead backend architectures for complex systems.
- Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS preferred) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
- Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging platforms such as Kafka.
- Strong understanding of RESTful APIs, microservices, and distributed system design.
- Knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern deployment practices.
- Skilled mentor with the ability to influence technical direction across teams.
- Strong problem-solving skills, balancing technical, product, and delivery considerations.
- Comfortable in agile environments using Git-based SCM and tools like Jira or Redmine.
- Awareness of compliance frameworks such as ISO27001 and PCI.
We encourage growth and progression because we value our colleagues and know that we best succeed when achieving and developing together.
Benefits:
mkodo is a great place to work, with excellent benefits comprising:
- Hybrid/Flexible Working
- Quarterly team events
- Birthday Holiday
- Christmas Day-Off
- Generous Holiday Allowance
- Tech Loan Scheme
- Performance bonus & profit share scheme
- Cycle to Work scheme
- Life insurance and income protection
- Travel Loan scheme
- Supplies of fresh fruits, cereals, biscuits, nibbles, etc. in the offices
- Relevant training and training budget.
- Digital Nomad Policy
- Generous refer a friend scheme