Engineering Lead - Verification Platform

Description

You will manage the Verification Platform team in London, part of the Business Onboarding Verification (BOV) organisation.

The team builds the shared platform that Business verification runs on. The sister team, BOV Global, uses it to ship customer-facing journeys and agent tooling.

The wider squad includes Business Onboarding Verification, Personal Onboarding Verification and the platform verification organisation.

In FY2025, 15.6M people and businesses used the company. It onboarded over 5.9M new customers, about 500K a month, and moved £145B across borders, about £400M a day, across 160+ countries and 40+ currencies.

Onboarding decisions gate about £25B a year in cross-currency volume.

Verification sits on the critical path for every new signup and for about 10 product teams that build on the platform today.

These systems are core production infrastructure. They protect customers and support growth, and they must stay reliable while regulations, policies and threat patterns keep changing.

The team's mission is to provide a platform that lets BOV Global and regional teams change business verification quickly and safely, without rebuilding the underlying plumbing.

The team owns three work-streams. The first is the business onboarding platform, which models business requirements as configuration per legal-entity type (Ltd, LLC, Sole Trader, Partnership, Corp), with versioned rules and repapering and refresh rails, so a policy change is a configuration choice rather than a multi-quarter project. The second is the review tooling platform, the surface on which Global and regional teams build review flows and which makes AI-assisted review and review automation measurable and safe to roll out. The third is unified vendor integrations, a single observable, retryable and swappable gateway for registry, adverse media, website signal, Acceptable Use Policy and business onboarding data vendors, replacing today's point-to-point integrations.

The problems are hard. A single business signup can touch several regulatory perimeters, for example a company incorporated in one country with a shareholder in another, plus industry-specific controls such as enhanced due diligence, sanctions and source-of-funds checks. The platform has to work out in real time what each regulator needs, verify it against the right sources, and keep the signup smooth. It must do this across 160+ countries with little or no new code per market.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and mentor a cross-functional team of engineers, supporting their growth, well-being and performance.
• Own the technical roadmap for the BOV platform, focusing on real reliability, security and scalability needs of the business verification stack.
• Work closely with BOV Global, Personal Onboarding, the platform verification organisation and Mitigation Handling so the platform meets actual product needs rather than the team's own assumptions.
• Contribute to delivery by supporting day-to-day execution, getting hands-on when needed and keeping up with the technology stack.
• Build a team culture of ownership, transparency, bottom-up decision-making, collaboration and continuous improvement, in line with how engineering works across the company.
• Make sure platform services have sound on-call rotas, SLAs, documentation and observability. Lead incident response in your area and turn each incident into a lasting fix.
• Work with engineering leads in Global KYC and Onboarding across London, Tallinn, Budapest and Hyderabad, and with the wider engineering community.
• Run the team's engineering rituals so that product development stays agile and predictable.

Requirements

• You have a proven record of leading and mentoring software engineers, including managing performance, well-being and growth, and handling difficult conversations constructively through 360 feedback, calibration and performance reviews.
• You have built and led platform or infrastructure teams whose customers are other engineering teams. You know how to say no, prioritise for leverage, and stop a platform becoming a queue of bespoke requests.
• You have solid Java 17+ skills and hands-on experience with Spring and Spring Boot, and you are willing to write code when the team needs it.
• You have strong system design skills and real experience with distributed, high-throughput, resilient services, including event-driven architectures, sagas, idempotency, and orchestration versus choreography trade-offs.
• You have worked with relational and non-relational databases, including query optimisation and schema design.
• You have led complex engineering solutions from design through delivery and understand their effect on business outcomes, including the trade-off between short-term product wins and long-term platform health.
• You put product and customer needs first, both external customers and the internal teams you serve, and you make decisions based on data.
• You communicate complex technical ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences and work well across geographies and time zones.
• You take strong ownership and accountability, work beyond a purely technical scope, and enable the wider team.
• As an EL1, you will lead a cross-functional platform team with a clear path to grow as the platform's remit expands across requirements, review, vendor gateway and repapering.
• You will own the technical roadmap and vision for the team and help shape the product roadmap and vision for BOV.
• You will propose ideas to improve the BOV platform and build support among stakeholders, including BOV Global, Personal Onboarding, Platform Verification, Mitigation Handling and Risk and Compliance, to unblock opportunities.
• You will build strong working relationships with the BOV Global team and the wider Global KYC and Onboarding squad across London, Tallinn, Budapest and Hyderabad.
• You will take long-term ownership of projects, train other engineers to avoid single points of failure, and plan ahead for hiring.
• You will shape services for iterative delivery and future scale through design work and reviews, and you will get hands-on when needed.
• You will work closely with product, analytics, compliance and operations to keep delivery smooth and effective.

Conditions

The role is based in London.

The role is at EL1 level.

The company is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds.