Lead Back End Engineer - Java & Go

Lead Engineer – Product Detail Pages (PDP)

Technology at Holland & Barrett

Help build the best health & wellness shopping experience on the web. As Lead Engineer in our OCX (Online Customer Experience) vertical, you'll own the product detail page journey across web and mobile – the place where customers discover, compare and decide what goes in their basket. This squad sits at the heart of our eCommerce platform, shaping how millions of customers explore products, understand ingredients and find what's right for their goals.

We're nearing the end of a multi‑year technical transformation and moving into the next phase: shipping new propositions at pace, modern architecture, and deeply personalised experiences across our PDPs and wider journey.

• Lead the design and delivery of high-quality, cross-functional software across a core set of PDP and OCX domains, operating independently without day‑to‑day technical oversight.

• Consistently ship resilient, observable services that improve page performance, conversion, and customer experience.

• Work closely with Product, UX, Data and CX to ensure initiatives land on time and solve real customer problems.

• Act as a multiplier: mentor and develop engineers in your squad, levelling up technical skills, code quality and delivery practices.

• Stay curious – bring new ideas, patterns and techniques from engineering, product and UX into the team.

• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders, including senior leadership.

• Understand how H&B's strategy and commercial priorities connect to the work your squad delivers.

• Keep the customer front and centre – build empathy for their needs and behaviour into technical decisions.

• Own security, reliability and compliance in your area, and plan how upcoming work will impact them.

• Fluent in Java (17+) and the Spring ecosystem (Spring Boot or similar: Quarkus, Micronaut).

• Equal fluency in idiomatic Go (Golang), including effective use of concurrency, robust error handling, and building/operating production-grade services.

• Strong understanding of HTTP and REST as an architectural style for building APIs.

• Confident with asynchronous programming in Java and event‑driven patterns.

• Fluent in SQL with experience of RDBMS such as Postgres and Oracle.

• Hands-on with Docker and docker‑compose.

• Exposure to AWS services such as S3, Aurora and ElastiCache.

• Experience with modern CI/CD platforms such as GitLab, GitHub Actions or CircleCI.

• Strong focus on monitoring and observability, proactive in detecting and resolving issues before they impact customers.

• Fluent with testing frameworks such as JUnit and RestAssured.

Nice to have

• Experience with monitoring/alerting platforms such as Datadog, PagerDuty, Grafana, Prometheus.

• Exposure to Python scripting.

• Experience with deployment platforms like Kubernetes and tooling such as Helm.