Staff Full Stack Engineer

About Allica Bank Allica is the UK’s fastest growing company - and the fastest-growing financial technology (Fintech) firm ever. Our purpose is to help established SMEs, one of the last major underserved opportunities in Fintech. Established SMEs are the backbone of local communities - representing over a third of our economy - yet have been largely neglected both by traditional high street banks and modern fintech providers. Department Description Technology sits at the centre of Allica. We design and build the platforms that power the bank, working closely with every part of the business to deliver real impact for customers. Our teams move quickly, focus on outcomes, and take ownership from concept through to delivery. We solve complex problems, modernise processes, and enable the business to scale with confidence. What makes us different is the level of influence and autonomy engineers have. We work without the weight of legacy systems, which means we can focus on building for the future. Everyone contributes ideas and helps shape how we operate, and roles evolve as the organisation grows. This is a place for people who want to have a tangible impact and do their best work in a modern, collaborative environment. Role Description The Staff Full Stack Engineer is responsible for setting technical direction across multiple squads, typically overseeing 2–3 squads and line-managing 3–5 Full Stack Engineers. The role exists to shape architecture, ensure the success of these squads, and drive consistent, secure, and compliant delivery across Allica’s digital products. You will use your expertise in Spring Boot microservices (Java/Kotlin) and modern web technologies (React/TypeScript) to define and evolve cross-squad patterns, shared tooling, and platform capabilities. Our backend microservices are containerised and deployed to Azure Container Apps, and our web applications are deployed to Azure Static Web Apps; you will help define and uphold the standards that make these platforms robust, cost-effective, and easy to operate. You will own key cross-cutting concerns such as authentication, observability, performance, accessibility, and regulatory compliance, ensuring our systems meet the standards expected of a UK bank. You are hands-on: you design and review architectures, pair with engineers, and contribute code to high-impact initiatives. You work closely with Product, Design and other engineering leaders to align technical direction with business goals and to unblock delivery. You drive the responsible adoption of GenAI and agentic engineering practices (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot), setting organisation-wide standards and measuring impact. Success in this role is reflected in simpler architectures, improved delivery consistency and reliability, stronger engineering effectiveness, and the growth and performance of your direct reports and squads. Principal Accountabilities Set and evolve cross-squad technical patterns and guardrails for: - Backend services (Kotlin/Java Spring Boot microservices, REST/OpenAPI, messaging, integrations). - Frontend architectures (React/TypeScript, shared design system, Nx, micro frontends where appropriate). - Authentication/authorisation, API gateways and API governance (versioning, contracts, deprecation). - Own platform-level technical initiatives that reduce complexity and duplication, including shared libraries, design system tokens, infrastructure templates, observability frameworks, and code/scaffolding templates. - Define and maintain organisation-wide standards for performance, reliability, security, accessibility, and operational excellence, in partnership with Architecture, InfoSec, Risk, and Compliance. - Establish and improve SLOs, error budget policies, and incident management practices across key services; lead post-incident reviews and drive follow-through on structural fixes. - Lead cross-squad system design for complex initiatives, ensuring coherent architectures, well-managed dependencies, clear domain boundaries, and effective interactions between services and frontends. - Shape and continuously improve cloud-native deployment patterns on Azure (Container Apps, Static Web Apps, networking, configuration, and scaling), working closely with Platform Engineering teams. - Drive improvements to developer experience (CI/CD, local development workflows, test strategy, release processes) across multiple squads, leveraging GitHub, Azure DevOps and other approved tools. Define and champion responsible AI-assisted engineering practices, including: - Standards for using Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot and other approved GenAI tools. - Expectations for review and validation of AI-generated code. - Measurement and optimisation of productivity gains and quality improvements. - Mentor and line-manage Senior Full Stack Engineers, supporting their growth in technical leadership, people leadership, and impact across squads. - Foster a culture of learning and continuous improvement through communities of practice, architecture forums, and regular knowledge-sharing. - Influence and communicate effectively with senior stakeholders (Product, Design, Operations, Risk, Compliance), aligning technical strategies with product and business roadmaps. Personal Attributes & Experience - Extensive experience designing and delivering distributed systems at scale using Spring Boot (Kotlin/Java) and modern web technologies (React/TypeScript). - Proven track record of simplifying complex architectures and defining cross-team patterns and platforms in a multi-squad environment. - Solid experience with containerised workloads and cloud platforms (Azure preferred; AWS or Google Cloud also valuable), including deployment, monitoring, and scaling of microservices and web applications. - Deep understanding of secure coding practices (e.g. OWASP), privacy, auditability, and regulatory expectations in financial services or similarly regulated environments. - Strong experience with observability, SLOs, incident management, and operational excellence (logging, tracing, metrics, dashboards, on-call practices). - Strong understanding of CI/CD and DevOps practices, ideally using GiHub actions or Azure DevOps Pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and automated testing at multiple levels. - Experience designing and governing APIs at scale (REST, OpenAPI, API gateways, versioning, backwards compatibility, service contracts). - Demonstrated ability to lead technical programmes or initiatives that span multiple teams and systems, delivering measurable improvements to reliability, performance, or developer productivity. - Experience introducing and scaling the use of new tools and standards across organisations, including GenAI technologies (e.g. GitHub Copilot) with appropriate guardrails. - Proven people leadership experience: line-managing senior engineers, coaching technical leaders, and building high-performing, inclusive teams. - Excellent communication and influencing skills, with the ability to work effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, communicate trade-offs clearly, and build consensus. Working at Allica Bank At Allica Bank we want to ensure our employees have the right tools and environment in which to succeed in their role and in support of our customers. Our employees are at the heart of everything we do, so our benefits are designed with you in mind: - Full onboarding support and continued development opportunities - Options for flexible working - Regular social activities - Pension contributions - Discretionary bonus scheme - Private health cover - Life assurance - Family friendly policies including enhanced Maternity & Paternity leave Don’t tick every box? Don’t worry if you don’t have all the skills or requirements listed on the job description. If you think you’ll be a good fit, we’d still love to hear from you! Flexible working We know the ‘9-to-5’ isn’t right for everyone. That’s why Allica Bank is fully committed to flexible and hybrid working. Please let us know what is best for you and, if we can, we will do our best to accommodate. Diversity We’re a diverse bunch here at Allica, with all kinds of experiences, backgrounds and lifestyles. Our openness and differences make us stronger, and we want everybody to feel comfortable bringing as much of themselves to work with them as they like.