Lead Java Developer/Solution Architect (6-month contract)
Role Summary
Join gravity9 as a Lead Java Developer/Solution Architect on a 6-month remote contract, leading large-scale modernization projects for UK government.
Minimum Requirements
Working context
Engagement Contract. Typically three to twelve months per programme, with a strong likelihood of rolling onto the next. Some roles begin part-time through a design phase before going full-time for build.
Clearance SC clearance is the standard requirement for these roles, and current SC will always be the fastest route onto a programme. We will consider especially strong candidates who hold BPSS only and can sponsor SC in those cases, though clearance takes roughly three months and start dates will reflect that.
Residency UK resident. All work on these programmes is delivered from the UK by UK-onshore staff.
Working model Predominantly remote with periodic onsite attendance. Locations vary by programme — expect occasional travel to client sites including London, Manchester and Leeds.
Environment Work is typically delivered through client-supplied devices or VDI, with VPN access to client environments. You should be comfortable operating within defined information-handling and access constraints, and with the pace that government security and onboarding processes set.
Team shape Small, focused, multi-disciplinary teams. On several programmes gravity9 delivers alongside partner organisations and other suppliers, and you will need to work effectively across those boundaries.
Timing These roles support a growing pipeline of central government work. Some engagements are contracted and mobilising; others are in contract negotiation with expected start dates in the coming months. We are building the bench now so that we can mobilise quickly, and clearance lead times mean early conversations are worthwhile even where a start date is not yet fixed.
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- Strong hands-on Java — building and running production services and RESTful APIs with Spring Boot or an equivalent framework
- MongoDB — solid working experience covering document modelling, querying, aggregation pipelines and indexing, and integrating MongoDB into Java application layers. Atlas and/or Enterprise Advanced
- Data-intensive systems — demonstrable experience of pipelines, migrations or integrations at meaningful scale, and sound reasoning about throughput, ordering, idempotency and failure recovery
- API design — clean, well-documented REST interfaces suitable for integration by multiple consuming systems
- Testing — genuine automated testing discipline, plus practical experience of load and stress testing against realistic volumes
- Infrastructure and deployment — Terraform or equivalent infrastructure as code, containerised deployment on Kubernetes, and AWS or a comparable cloud
- Communication — able to write clear design documentation and hold your own in a client design authority or architecture review
- UK resident, and either holding current UK SC clearance or clearly eligible to obtain it
- UK public sector, or another regulated and security-conscious environment
- Kafka and change-data-capture tooling such as Debezium; stream processing
- Legacy modernisation patterns — strangler fig, operational data layers, dual running and phased cutover
- Domain-driven design and bounded-context analysis; monolith decomposition
- Attribute-based access control and policy-as-code frameworks (OPA, Casbin, XACML-based systems)
- Field-level or client-side encryption, key management, HSM/KMS and KMIP integration
- Search — Lucene-based or Atlas Search, vector search, hybrid retrieval and RAG patterns
- Metadata standards such as DCAT or Dublin Core; data cataloguing, data mesh and federated data architecture concepts
- Event-driven architecture and consistency patterns in distributed systems (saga, eventual consistency)
- Oracle, COBOL or other mainframe and legacy platform familiarity
- Time-series or geospatial data; deployment to constrained or edge hardware
- AI-assisted development workflows and agentic coding tools
Eligibility Criteria
No specific eligibility requirements are mentioned, making it unclear for international applicants.
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