Lead Full Stack Kotlin Developer

About The Role

Hippo is a rapidly growing digital consultancy passionate about building and delivering transformative digital solutions for a diverse range of Public and Private sector clients. We are recruiting for a Lead Full Stack Kotlin Developer to join our Hippo Herd. We work at the intersection of strategy, design, and technology to solve complex problems and create lasting value. Our collaborative and agile culture empowers our teams to make a genuine impact.

As a Lead Full Stack Kotlin Developer, you will play an important role in making Hippo the best Consultancy out there. You will work as part of a multi-disciplinary team combining data, design, product, delivery, analysis and engineering to deliver bespoke digital services that make a positive and meaningful impact on organisations and society. We're confident in our abilities, authentic in our approach, and passionate about what we do.

You will act as a Lead Consultant to deliver Kotlin Development services to our clients. Lead Full Stack Kotlin Developers are experts in their field, providing strategic technical guidance and hands-on leadership within squads and the wider Hippo engineering community.

Our solutions empower our customers to build and support secure, scalable, and well-engineered systems beyond traditional boundaries that allow our customers to understand and get the most from their data and digital services. The Lead Full Stack Kotlin Developer will be a key player and implementer in this.

Your Role in a Nutshell

• Act as a technical SME within the squad to produce and ensure user-centred software is developed based on business requirements and following best practice.


• Work collaboratively with colleagues and stakeholders to explore, design, and deliver solutions to complex client problems.


• Continuously review and prioritise the delivery team's workload.


• Design and manage software development and deployment pipelines, resolving issues and potential bottlenecks.


• Communicate and present prototypes, solutions, and progress to internal and external stakeholders in a clear, concise manner.


• Lead the recruitment and onboarding of other engineers and support their professional development through mentoring and coaching.

Skills and experience that you need

Essential Experience

• Extensive experience in Kotlin and the full development lifecycle delivering user-centred digital solutions (with a strong foundation in Java/JVM ecosystem).


• Proven track record of leading a delivery team to deliver high-quality, robust, and scalable solutions.


• Expertise in building back-end services using Kotlin with Spring Boot and the wider Spring Framework (Spring MVC, Spring Security, REST APIs), leveraging Kotlin idioms and coroutines where applicable.


• Experience in Microservices design and architecture, including RESTful API services and Kotlin-based microservice patterns.


• Expertise in public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and DevOps practices, including containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes).


• In-depth knowledge of Infrastructure as Code tools such as CloudFormation or Terraform.


• Proficient in using CI/CD tools such as Jenkins or Azure DevOps.


• Experience with front-end technologies (e.g., Angular, React, and TypeScript).

Desirable Experience

• Previous experience working on GOV/NHS projects or in a consultancy environment.


• Experience migrating legacy Java codebases to idiomatic Kotlin.


• Experience with asynchronous messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and Kotlin Coroutines/Flow for reactive programming.


• Familiarity with Kotlin-native frameworks (e.g., Ktor) or functional programming libraries (e.g., Arrow).

What makes us great

Alongside working with some of the most talented people out there and on-top of a competitive salary, which we’re transparent about from the outset, you can also expect a range of benefits:

• Contributory Pension Scheme (Hippo 6% & Employee 2%)


• 25 Days Holiday plus UK Public Holidays


• Perkbox access for a wide range of discounts


• Critical illness cover


• Life assurance and death in service cover


• Volunteer days


• Cycle-to-work scheme for the avid cyclists


• Salary sacrifice electric vehicles scheme


• Season ticket loans


• Financial and general wellbeing sessions


• Flexible benefits scheme with options of:


• Private health cover


• Private dental cover


• Additional company pension contributions


• Additional holidays (up to an extra 2 days)


• Wellbeing contribution


• Charity contributions


• Tree planting

Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at Hippo

At Hippo, we’re dedicated to creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace that works for everyone. We understand that having a diverse team unlocks our capacity for innovation, creativity and problem solving. Only by building a community of diverse perspectives, cultures and socio-economic backgrounds can we create an environment where all can contribute and thrive.

We actively encourage applications from under-represented groups including women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, neurodivergent and people with disabilities. We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruitment process that reflects our workplace culture. We are a registered Disability Confident Employer, Mindful Employer, Endometriosis Friendly Employer and a member of the Armed Forces Covenant. Hippo continually strives to remove barriers, provide accommodations and offer reasonable adjustments to ensure equity throughout our practices.

Hi, we’re Hippo

At Hippo, we design with empathy and build for impact. We do this by combining data-informed evidence, human-centred design and software engineering. We're a digital services partner who is genuinely invested in helping our clients thrive as modern organisations. Our delivery methodology is truly agile, from concept to reality, supporting innovation and continuous improvement to achieve your desired outcomes.

We firmly believe that technology should serve humanity, not the other way around. We take a human-centred approach to everything we do because we understand that complex problems require a service design approach. This means understanding how users behave and ensuring our solutions work for them in the real world.

Our combination of data, design, and engineering delivers bespoke digital services that make a positive and meaningful impact on organisations and society.

Have a look through our Website at Our Story & Purpose, Our Culture & Values, Case Studies and Our Solutions & Services to find out some more!

Hippo Locations

We are headquartered in Leeds and have offices across the UK in Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, London and Bristol. We're on the lookout for top talent nationwide but you need to be located within reasonable travelling distance from one of our offices. Given the dynamic nature of a consulting business, you may be required to work on-site at a Hippo office or at an in/out of town client location for a number of days per week (client dependent) and therefore candidates will need to be open/flexible to travel and working on one of those sites at least 2 days per week. We offer a generous relocation support package of up to £8,000 (please ask for terms and conditions) to help make your move a smooth one.