VodafoneThree - Senior Software Engineer

Location: London OR Newbury + HybridSalary: Excellent basic salary plus bonus and Vodafone benefitsWorking hours: Full time 37.5 hours per week – Monday to Friday

Hybrid

We believe that through collaboration and connection with our colleagues we can achieve great things. Our hybrid working approach allows our people to work both in the office and at home, providing the flexibility and resources you need to succeed in your role. We don't require you to be in on specific days; instead, we ask people to come into the office 2-3 days each week, for at least 8 days per month. You should work with your line manager to understand what their expectations are for you, your specific role and your team.

Who We Are

We’re here to build a network the UK can count on – one that connects people, places and potential. Because no matter where you live, what your background is, or how you get online – we think everyone deserves the same chance to stay connected, and with VodafoneThree, that future’s being built – today.

We’re creating more than the UK’s best network. We’re helping close the digital divide, empower communities and drive meaningful progress.

We believe that everyone should feel they belong. Whoever you are and whatever your story, there’s space for you here. We’re building a workplace where different perspectives are welcomed, voices are heard, and everyone feels safe to show up as themselves.

You’ll join a team that genuinely cares – about each other, about our customers, and about the future we’re building. From day one, you’ll be welcomed, valued and encouraged to bring your whole self to work.

Join us and you’ll be at the heart of change. That means building responsibly, investing sustainably and creating opportunities that last.

We’re not just expanding connectivity; we’re reimagining what a connected nation looks like. With £11bn invested in 5G and digital infrastructure, your work will directly power businesses, services, and communities across the country.

You’ll work on real challenges, with real impact, across every corner of the country. Wherever you join us, whatever your role, you’ll be helping to build a future that works better for everyone.

We move at pace, because what we’re building matters – and we’re learning as we go. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, but we’re just getting started.

Join our IT teams, which is at the core of our digital future, analysing and operating all our internal and customer-facing systems, with the aim of delivering the best customer experience. None of it would be possible without our innovative teams, creating a connected future with technologies like Cloud, AI and big data.

What you’ll do

We're looking for an experienced Senior Engineer to join our cross functional team and help build and scale high-quality, performant backend applications. You'll take technical ownership of features end to end, mentor other engineers, and play a key role in shaping our back-end architecture and engineering standards. You'll bring deep expertise in modern microservices architecture and help raise the bar for how we design, build and ship software.

• Build, maintain, and evolve scalable, high-performance backend services using Java, Spring Boot, and Go. Take ownership of features from technical design through to delivery and ongoing support.
• Design robust microservice architectures, define service boundaries, and contribute to architectural decisions that support scalability, maintainability, and long-term evolution.
• Broaden your skill set beyond the back end by T-shaping into adjacent areas such as front end or app engineering, contributing across the wider stack as needed.
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate delivery in a safe, scalable and maintainable way, establishing good practice for how the team adopts them.
• Collaborate closely with product, design and cross domain teams to deliver well-architected solutions.
• Champion code quality through reviews, testing, and clear engineering standards.
• Mentor and support more junior engineers, sharing knowledge and best practice.
• Help define and evolve the backend architecture, tooling and CI/CD processes.
• Investigate and resolve performance, accessibility and stability issues across the application.

Who you are

• Strong professional experience building and operating production-grade backend systems using Java and Spring Boot, with solid knowledge of object-oriented design, clean code, and software engineering principles.
• Proven experience designing and developing distributed microservices, including service boundaries, API contracts, inter-service communication, and independent deployment.
• Strong understanding of asynchronous processing, messaging patterns, event-based integration, eventual consistency, idempotency, retries, dead-letter queues, and failure handling.
• Experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs, versioned contracts, and integrations with internal and external systems.
• Ability to diagnose complex production issues, analyse system behaviour, and implement solutions that improve resilience and observability.
• Experience with automated testing (unit, integration, end-to-end) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong understanding of performance optimisation and debugging.
• A willingness to T-shape and grow into adjacent areas such as web or app engineering. Good collaboration and communication skills, with experience of mentoring others.

Desirable:

• Understanding of secure coding practices, authentication and authorisation, secrets management, encryption, and least-privilege access in cloud environments.
• Experience with load testing, capacity planning, profiling, caching strategies, and optimisation of high-throughput or latency-sensitive services.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g. code generation, review or testing assistants) in a production setting.
• Experience optimising AWS infrastructure costs, serverless execution, compute utilisation, and service-level resource consumption.
• Experience with high-traffic online retail platforms and business-critical flows.

Worried that you don’t meet all the desired criteria exactly?We know that everyone is unique, with multiple aspects to their identity and different experiences behind them. We are passionate about Inclusion for All 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 apply as you may be the right candidate for this role or another role, and our recruitment team can help you see how your skills fit in.

What we offer

We care about our people’s success by offering great pay, bonuses, up to 28 days off plus bank holidays, and paid time for charity work. You can personalise our benefits for you and your family, like discounts, vouchers, a pension plan and loads more. We help with your career through our amazing learning tools and top-notch parental leave policies.

We are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and all offers of employment for this role are subject to background checks, including criminal (DBS) and financial checks to meet the regulators standards.

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, a sign language interpreter, or assistive technology, please refer to the Accessibility section of our Careers website () for guidance.

We use AI in different parts of our business to boost innovation, improve efficiency, and create new opportunities. We know many candidates use AI to fine-tune their CVs or prepare for interviews, but what we really care about is your unique experiences and achievements.

During the interview, we want you to rely on your own knowledge and skills to show us who you really are—your personality, creativity, and abilities. Above all, we’re looking for authenticity and can’t wait to get to know the real you.

#VodafoneThree#LI-Hybrid