Lead Backend Engineer

About The Business
Quilter plc is a leading wealth management business, helping to enable brighter financial futures for every generation.

Quilter oversees £126.3 billion in customer investments (as of August It has an adviser and customer offering spanning financial advice, investment platforms, multi-asset investment solutions, and discretionary fund management. The business is comprised of two segments: Affluent and High Net Worth.

Affluent encompasses the financial planning business, Quilter Financial Planning, the Quilter Investment Platform and Quilter Investors, the multi-asset investment solutions business.

High Net Worth includes the discretionary fund management business, Quilter Cheviot, together with Quilter Cheviot Financial Planning – offering a highly personalised service to private clients, charities, trustees, and professional partners. Quilter Cheviot has presence throughout the UK, Ireland and Channel Islands.

At Quilter we never stand still. Our foundations are rooted in our extraordinary expertise, which is trusted by hundreds of thousands of customers, but we have great ambitions to stay one step ahead and make an even greater difference to the people and communities we serve, including our colleagues.

Our business is transforming, continually modernising, and becoming even more customer centric. So, if you want to be bold in the pursuit of your ambitions, bring new ideas, and challenge and evolve what we do, it's the perfect time to join us

About The Role
Level
: 5

Department:
Quilter Invest -Engineering

Location
: England Home Worker

Contract type
: Permanent

Who are we?
We're Quilter Invest, a scale up FinTech app that's pioneering the future of wealth management with cutting-edge solutions tailored for a new generation of investors. Our mission is to empower individuals to take control of their financial future through smart, intuitive tools that make investing and saving easy and accessible.

We began as a startup called Wombat Invest in 2020, and after various rounds of funding, have now successfully been acquired by Quilter plc to provide more investing and savings offerings to their customer base, and help bring new customers on board. We're currently scaling up fast so we can position ourselves as a leading FinTech product in the market.

What's the position?
We're looking for a
Lead Backend Engineer
to take ownership of our backend systems and lead a team of experienced engineers. You'll play a key role in shaping our architecture, mentoring senior developers, and working closely with product and design to deliver scalable, secure, and high-quality features.

This is a
strategic leadership role
with hands-on technical involvement where needed. You'll be responsible for steering our technical direction, ensuring engineering excellence, and helping the team grow and succeed.

Tech Stack
: Laravel, PHP, AWS, Terraform, Docker, GitHub, Sentry

What are my roles and responsibilities?

• Lead and mentor a team of 3 Senior Backend Engineers and 1 Senior DevOps Engineer.
• Make architectural and design decisions for critical backend systems.
• Set engineering standards and review code to ensure quality, security, and performance.
• Collaborate with product managers and designers to shape features from idea to implementation.
• Drive backend strategy and planning, balancing short-term delivery with long-term maintainability.
• Work with the DevOps engineer to ensure stable, observable, and scalable infrastructure (AWS/Terraform).
• Support a culture of continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and technical excellence.
• Remain hands-on when necessary — reviewing pull requests, debugging complex issues, or prototyping new ideas.

Can I work remotely?
From anywhere in the UK We have people in London, Brighton, Northern Ireland, Manchester, Leeds and more. As long as you're in the UK and have internet, you can work wherever you want.

What's it like working at Quilter Invest?
We've always been a small team, but as we're currently scaling up, we'll almost be doubling our development team. That means you'll be joining a welcoming and close-knit team who have been at the company for many years and joining an expanding team at the same time. We'll be going from three developers on each mobile platform, to six each. We use Slack within Quilter Invest for fast communication, and Teams to stay in contact with the broader Quilter company. As we've always been remote, we make an effort to stay connected to each other, and every now and then we'll do an optional office day at our headquarters in Bank, London.

Requirements
*About You*

• Extensive experience working with PHP and Laravel in production environments.
• Strong experience in a technical leadership role, managing and mentoring other engineers.
• Strong AWS experience, including EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, and IAM.
• Solid Terraform skills, with experience managing infrastructure as code.
• Deep understanding of RESTful API design and backend architecture principles.
• Track record of making pragmatic, scalable architectural decisions within a monolithic codebase.
• Experience working with Agile methodologies (Scrum or Kanban).
• Strong collaboration and communication skills – you know how to work effectively with product managers, designers, and other teams.
• Familiarity with GitHub, Docker, and Sentry as part of your engineering workflow.

Preferred But Not Essential

• . Understanding of database performance tuning and query optimization (PostgreSQL or MySQL).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment best practices

*Inclusion & Diversity*
We value diversity and strive to promote inclusivity in all aspects of our culture. We believe in equal opportunities for all, ensuring that no applicant encounters less favourable treatment based on anything but their skills, qualifications, experience, and potential. We celebrate the unique contributions of a diverse workforce and create a respectful, nurturing environment where every colleague can thrive.

*Values
Do the right thing:*
We act with integrity and are proudly committed to going above and beyond in service of our clients and the support we provide our communities.

Always curious:
We continuously seek new ideas and knowledge so we're one step ahead of our clients' needs. We look for inspiration everywhere and encourage experimentation, recognising that this is how we create brilliant solutions for brighter futures.

Embrace challenge:
We aim high to transform our potential into meaningful outcomes. With ambition as our driving force and a steadfast commitment to growth, we succeed for the good of every generation.

Stronger together:
Combining our diverse talents, we accomplish more collectively than we ever could do alone. We speak openly, actively listen, and support each other, and constructively challenge and embrace new ideas. We seek empowerment and demonstrate ownership and trust, with the confidence to make impactful decisions.

*Core Benefits
Holiday:*
182 hours (26 days)

Quilter Incentive Scheme:
All employees are eligible to participate in incentive scheme, to incentivise business performance and their contribution.

Pension Scheme:
A non-contributory company pension scheme that can be boosted through personal contributions.

Private Medical Insurance:
Single cover as standard with options to increase cover to include your partner or children.

Life Assurance:
4x your salary.

Income Protection:
75% of salary, less state benefits, payable after 26 weeks of absence.

Healthcare Cash Plan:
Jersey employees only

In addition to our core benefits, we offer a range of flexible benefits to UK employees that you can choose from and pay for conveniently via a salary deduction.