Backend Chapter Lead

Job Description

Join Us

At Vodafone, we’re not just shaping the future of connectivity for our customers – we’re shaping the future for everyone who joins our team. When you work with us, you’re part of a global mission to connect people, solve complex challenges, and create a sustainable and more inclusive world. If you want to grow your career whilst finding the perfect balance between work and life, Vodafone offers the opportunities to help you belong and make a real impact.

Role Purpose

Digital transformation is a journey not a one off-event. It needs to be nurtured and grown by talented people who experiment, fail fast, innovate and fight ambiguity at place to shape our digital future.

So, we are looking for an experienced and passionate Tech Lead to drive the design, development, and delivery of scalable digital solutions that serve millions of customers.

As a Tech Lead, you will combine technical excellence, engineering leadership, and strategic thinking to guide a high-performing agile team. You will work closely with Product Owners, Solution Architects, Engineering Managers, and business stakeholders to transform business requirements into reliable, secure, and scalable digital products.

This is a hands-on leadership role where you will lead by example, contribute to architecture and development, mentor engineers, and help shape the future of Vodafone's digital platforms.

Role Responsibilitoes

Technical Leadership

• Help the team plan, prioritize and make the right trade-offs. Ensuring business goals are achieved while also realizing your long-term technical vision.
• Lead the technical design and delivery of digital products and services.
• Define scalable, resilient, and secure software architectures.
• Drive technical decision-making and establish engineering best practices.
• Review solution designs and ensure alignment with enterprise architecture standards.
• Lead technical estimations, planning activities, and delivery execution.
• Collaboration: You are able to communicate your views both when specifying new features with stakeholders and while providing technical mentorship to your colleagues.

Software Engineering

• Participate in hands-on development of critical platform components.
• Design and develop high-performance microservices and APIs.
• Ensure software quality through code reviews, automated testing, and engineering standards.
• Optimize applications for scalability, performance, availability, and security.
• Drive adoption of modern software engineering practices and emerging technologies.

Team Leadership & Mentorship

• Mentor & Invest in your people. Through real conversations, honest feedback, and hands-on coaching, you help them grow faster than they would anywhere else.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Lead technical discussions, design reviews, and knowledge-sharing sessions.

Product & Stakeholder Collaboration

• Partner with Product Owners and business stakeholders to understand requirements and define technical solutions.
• Translate business objectives into technical roadmaps and actionable engineering plans.
• Balance short-term delivery goals with long-term platform sustainability.
• Drive roadmap discussions and provide technical guidance during product planning.
  
  

Innovation & AI Enablement

• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend innovative solutions.
• Explore opportunities to leverage AI, automation, and intelligent systems within digital products.

Collaborate with stakeholders to align AI-driven solutions with business objectives.

Competencies and Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience with strong backend development expertise.
• 2+ years of experience leading technical teams, projects, or major initiatives.
• Proven experience designing and delivering enterprise-scale software solutions.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
• Experience working within Agile/Scrum environments.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management capabilities.
• Product-oriented mindset with a focus on delivering business value through technology.

Our Tech: Java 21/25 (Spring 6 with Spring Boot 3.5, Hibernate), Maven, Kong, Keycloak, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Oracle DB, Redis, Elastic ELK, Git, Docker, AWS, Azure, Helm, Kubernetes, Jenkins, OpenShift, Python 3.x.

Not a perfect fit?

Worried that you don’t meet all the desired criteria exactly? At Vodafone we are passionate about empowering people and creating a workplace where everyone can thrive, whatever their personal or professional background. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align exactly with every part of the job description, we encourage you to still apply as you may be the right candidate for this role or another opportunity.

Who we are

We are a leading international Telco, serving millions of customers. At Vodafone, we believe that connectivity is a force for good. If we use it for the things that really matter, it can improve people's lives and the world around us. Through our technology we empower people, connecting everyone regardless of who they are or where they live and we protect the planet, whilst helping our customers do the same.

Belonging at Vodafone isn't a concept; it's lived, breathed, and cultivated through everything we do. You'll be part of a global and diverse community, with many different minds, abilities, backgrounds and cultures. ;We're committed to increase diversity, ensure equal representation, and make Vodafone a place everyone feels safe, valued and included.

If you require any reasonable adjustments or have an accessibility request as part of your recruitment journey, for example, extended time or breaks in between online assessments, please refer to https://careers.vodafone.com/application-adjustments/ for guidance.

Together we can.