Java Developer (Active SC Clearance Required)

Location: Hybrid (approximately 2 days per month required onsite in London)
Contract Type: Permanent/ or initial 12-Month Fixed Term Contract (FTC)
Employer: Amber Labs – Digital Consultancy
Clearance: Active SC Clearance Required
Start Date: Immediate

About Amber Labs

Amber Labs is a forward-thinking digital consultancy delivering innovative cloud, data, and DevOps solutions across the UK public sector. We specialise in helping organisations achieve digital transformation at pace while maintaining the highest security and governance standards.

We are seeking a Java Developer to join a collaborative Agile delivery team and develop secure, scalable, and maintainable enterprise applications within a government delivery environment.

Role Overview

This role is centred on strong Java engineering, supported by practical experience with the Spring Framework, a solid understanding of software design patterns, and a passion for delivering high-quality code.

The successful candidate will contribute across the full software development lifecycle, working closely with developers, testers, architects, and business stakeholders while embracing modern engineering practices such as TDD, CI/CD, and containerisation.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain Java-based applications using Spring technologies
• Develop secure and scalable RESTful APIs
• Apply software design patterns and engineering best practices to produce maintainable solutions
• Write clean, testable code using TDD principles
• Contribute to automated testing and CI/CD pipelines
• Support containerised application development and deployment
• Participate in code reviews and technical design discussions
• Troubleshoot and resolve defects and production issues
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary Agile teams to deliver high-quality software solutions

Essential Skills & Experience

Java (Primary Requirement)

• Strong commercial experience developing enterprise applications using Java
• Excellent understanding of:
  Object-oriented programming (OOP)
  SOLID principles
  Exception handling
  Collections and concurrency fundamentals
  Clean code and refactoring techniques  
• Experience developing secure, maintainable, and scalable backend applications

Spring Framework (Essential)

• Proven experience with the Spring Framework, including Spring Boot
• Strong understanding of:
  Dependency Injection (IoC) / Spring MVC / RESTful API development Configuration management / Integration with external services
• Experience building production-ready applications using Spring-based technologies

Software Design Patterns

• Strong understanding of software design principles and common design patterns
• Ability to apply appropriate patterns to solve business and technical challenges
• Comfortable discussing:
  Design decisions
  Architectural trade-offs
  Maintainability and scalability considerations
• Awareness of patterns such as:
  Factory / Strategy / Builder / Singleton (where appropriate) / Observer Dependency Injection

Containerisation

• Practical experience with container technologies such as:
  Docker & Kubernetes
• Understanding of:
  Container lifecycle
  Local development environments
  Deployment considerations

CI/CD

• Experience working with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipelines
• Understanding of:
  Automated builds / Automated testing / Deployment pipelines
  Release management practices
• Comfortable working within modern DevOps-enabled delivery environments

Apply Now and help shape the future of UK digital services with Amber Labs.