Modernization Engineer Lead

About the role

We’re searching for a Modernization Engineer Lead to lead the re-design of our in-house applications. Working closely with the Principal Architect and providing mentorship to our developers, this role will be the main driver of continuous improvements to define and enforce standards across the team.

About Bestway

Bestway Group is a diversified multinational family owned business with annualised turnover in excess of £4.5 billion.  Starting off as a chain of retail convenience stores, the Group has grown to become a diversified multinational business with interests across the wholesale, pharmacy, real estate, cement and banking sectors.  The Group is also the largest overseas investor in Pakistan. 

Owned by the Pervez, Choudrey and Sheikh families, Bestway Group was founded in 1976 by Sir Anwar Pervez OBE H Pk, who remains Chairman.  Serving over 12 million customers and employing over 28,000 individuals, the Group supports and serves communities through its operations across the UK, Pakistan and the Middle East

Responsibilities:

• Engineering Standards: Define and enforce Bestway's Java and Node.js coding standards across the team — with a specific focus on robust exception handling, ninary stream handling, structured logging via Application Insights, and adherence to security-first development practices.
• Cloud-Native Readiness: Ensure all application logic is optimised for containerisation from the ground up. This includes implementing proper Health Check endpoints, secure Secret Management via Azure Key Vault, correct port mapping for Container Apps, and stateless design principles compatible with Azure Container Apps (ACA).
• Technical Mentorship: Provide direct, hands-on mentorship to junior and mid-level developers — identifying technical debt at the codebase level, running structured code reviews, and building a culture of engineering excellence that prevents recurring quality issues such as corrupted or misconfigured deployments.
• Architectural Liaison: Work closely with the Principal Architect to translate High-Level Designs (HLDs) into production-ready implementation plans — ensuring the development team understands not just what to build, but why the architectural decisions were made, and what constraints must be respected.
• Quality Assurance: Champion a strong automated testing culture — unit tests, integration tests, and contract tests — to prevent regression and ensure deployments are verifiably stable before reaching production.

The Ideal Candidate:

• Experience: 10+ years in Java development with significant, demonstrable experience in Spring Boot and Microservices architecture — not just familiarity, but production ownership.
• Azure Integration: Proven experience building applications that consume Azure-native services, including Azure Key Vault for secrets, Azure Storage API, and Azure Service Bus for event-driven messaging.
• DevOps Mindset: Solid understanding of the full CI/CD lifecycle; comfortable reading and contributing to Dockerfiles and GitHub Actions YAML workflows — not as a DevOps engineer, but as a developer who understands the pipeline their code flows through.
• API Mastery: Deep expertise in RESTful API design principles, OAuth2 authentication flows (including FusionAuth integration), and DMARC-compliant transactional email logic via SendGrid.
• Testing Discipline: A strong, non-negotiable focus on automated Unit and Integration testing — with the ability to define testing standards that the wider team can adopt and maintain consistently.
• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience. Relevant Microsoft Azure developer certifications are advantageous.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary
• Pension
• 22 days annual leave, plus bank holidays
• Onsite parking
• Life assurance

We understand that no applicant ever ticks every box so please do consider applying should some or most of the above apply.  Bestway Group is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity and inclusion. We welcome people of different nationalities, backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. We want strong, and diverse teams built from talented individuals with different backgrounds identities and experiences.

If this is of interest to you and you would like to learn more, please do get in touch, we are looking forward to hearing from you.