Technical Lead - Backend (Java / Spring Boot)

Who we are CreateFuture is fast becoming the UK’s most recognisable digital consultancy, with years of experience building digital products and services for major organisations whilst putting our people first. We have offices in the centre of Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, and London as well as remote employees located throughout the country. We are a team of creators - whether that’s code, project plans, go to market strategies, culture initiatives, marketing campaigns, large language models or people policies. And together, with our clients, we create the future. This has seen us collaborate and partner across a multitude of industries and sectors, with the likes of PayPal, Adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert to name just a few. Our reputation as a partner determined to deliver high-quality, robust and thoughtful products has enabled us to scale to over 500 people in the last couple of years, and it is our amazing people - along with the safe, supportive and friendly culture we have built - that makes CreateFuture a great place to work. Don’t just take our word for it though, we have been recognised by Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row - across a number of categories - and our employee exit rate is astonishingly low. Join us on our journey… Let’s create something awesome, together, today. About the role and team: This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role. You will be embedded in a team delivering for a client in a fast-paced, product-led environment, and you will be accountable for how your workstream is delivered, not just the code you write. You lead from the front: still close enough to the technology to make the call, and senior enough to own the outcome. You set the technical direction, keep the delivery signal honest, and grow the engineers around you. We work at pace. Priorities move, requirements are rarely perfect on day one, and we value people who can bring order to ambiguity rather than wait for it to clear. How we work with AI: AI-assisted development is core to how we build, not a side experiment. We use modern AI coding agents to remove the drudgery so engineers can focus on the high-value decisions: architecture, trade-offs, and getting the right thing built. Humans own every change, and quality is held by review and ownership, not by the tool. As a Tech Lead you will help raise the quality and consistency of how the team uses AI: knowing the domain and the codebase well enough to steer the tools, avoid reinventing what already exists, and articulate intent clearly so the AI accelerates good engineering rather than multiplying mediocre code. Our tech stack Core: Java (with Spring Boot) A roughly even split of RESTful Java APIs and Kafka / event-driven services CI/CD pipelines AWS (including S3, Lambda, ECS, EKS, MSK) Broader ecosystem you will get your hands on: Kubernetes and containerisation Infrastructure as code AI integrations and agentic development workflows Strong security practices across the stack Full DevOps ownership ("you build it, you run it") You will not need all of this from day one, but these are the tools, systems and practices you will work with. What you'll be doing: Technical: Building Java services across REST APIs and Kafka / event-driven pipelines (roughly an even split), with a focus on readable, maintainable and well-tested code Writing tests as part of development (TDD approaches are encouraged) Integrating with third-party APIs (for example payment gateways and suppliers) Defining and overseeing technical implementations: shaping how things are built, not just writing code Championing AI-assisted ways of working and lifting the bar on quality, consistency and reuse across the team Leading the workstream: Owning your workstream end to end: