Job Profile

Job Title:          HR Advisor

Location:          Cardiff

Salary:    £35,000 - £40,000, depending on experience. Plus a discretionary bonus

What you’ll do

We’re looking for an HR Advisor who will be the first point of contact for people matters across LDMS. Working closely with our HR Manager and HR & Office Administrator, you’ll give clear, practical advice to employees and managers, and help make sure our people processes are fair, consistent and in line with employment law.

This is a varied, hands-on generalist role. You’ll manage employee relations casework from informal concerns through to formal processes, own absence management and coach managers to hold effective performance conversations. You’ll also handle holiday and flexible working requests, support probation reviews, and contribute to policy updates and our monthly HR report.

To succeed, you’ll need solid generalist HR experience and a working knowledge of UK employment law, with the confidence to apply it pragmatically. Just as important is the ability to build trusted relationships with managers, and to coach and constructively challenge them when needed.

Key Responsibilities

These may change with the needs of the business, but the main areas are:

Employee Relations

• Acting as the first point of contact for employees and managers on day-to-day people and employee relations matters, providing clear, practical and consistent advice
• Managing informal and formal employee relations cases, including grievance, disciplinary and capability matters
• Identifying recurring themes or risks and escalating complex or high-risk matters to the HR Manager

Absence & Return to Work

• Owning the absence management process, monitoring sickness absence data and identifying where trigger points have been reached
• Conducting return-to-work meetings and absence reviews, making sure outcomes are recorded consistently
• Managing long-term sickness cases, including keeping in touch with the employee, liaising with occupational health, agreeing reasonable adjustments and planning phased returns

Performance Support

• Coaching line managers to prepare for and hold effective performance conversations, including one-to-ones, appraisals and more difficult conversations
• Leading formal performance meetings alongside managers, providing guidance and ensuring consistency and fairness
• Supporting 3 and 6 month probation reviews for new starters

HR Operations

• Managing holiday approvals and flexible working requests through to decision
• Contributing to the review and update of HR policies and procedures in line with group policy and current employment law
• Maintaining accurate HR records and providing data and insight on absence and casework trends for the monthly HR report
• Supporting the HR & Office Administrator and HR Manager with recruitment

What you’ll bring

Essential

• Experience in an HR Officer, HR Advisor or similar generalist HR role
• Experience managing a range of employee relations cases, including absence, disciplinary, grievance and performance matters
• Working knowledge of UK employment law and good practice, with the confidence to apply it pragmatically
• CIPD Level 5 qualification (or working towards), or equivalent practical experience
• Confidence to coach and constructively challenge managers, building credible, trusted relationships at all levels
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including drafting clear case documentation such as investigation reports and outcome letters
• Sound judgement and the ability to handle sensitive and confidential information with discretion

Desirable

• Experience working in a technology or financial services environment
• Experience using HR systems and HR metrics to report on trends and support decisions

Mid-Level Engineer

Location: Cardiff · Hybrid

Salary: up to £55,000, depending on experience plus a potential bonus up to £11,000

A hands-on role building features from design through to production and helping junior engineers improve, at one of Europe's leading financial businesses

About LDMS

Founded in 2018, LDMS is part of the LC Financial Holdings group, a three-pillar organisation with over 950 employees across Europe. Between us we have more than 20 years of world-class credit expertise.

We build digital lending software in a market growing around 18% a year. We want to lead that space, and to do it we need people who can think, create and challenge each other to find the best solutions for our customers. We have an ambitious to-do list: improving what we've built, building new products, and moving into new markets.

The Role

You'll join the Engineering team at LDMS as a Mid-Level Engineer, working within a single team and reporting to an Engineering Team Lead. You'll design and build features end-to-end, from working out the approach to getting them into production and checking they work once they're live. You'll work within the technical direction and patterns set by your Lead Engineer and the senior engineers on your team. Our stack is React and TypeScript on the frontend, Java with Spring Boot on the backend, and PostgreSQL with schema-per-tenant multi-tenancy underneath, all cloud-hosted on AWS.

You'll be responsible for the quality of your own work, review other people's code, take part in design discussions, and help newer engineers when they get stuck. Over time you'll take on bigger pieces of work that cover several parts of the system, and decide how the features you own are tested. This is a hands-on role, not a line-management one.

Key Responsibilities

These may change with the needs of the business, but the main areas are:

Technical Skills

• Design and build small to medium features end-to-end without needing close supervision, keeping the code easy to maintain.
• Make good technical choices within our existing patterns and be able to explain why you made them.
• Write unit, integration and contract tests, and decide how the features you own should be tested, including failure cases.
• Think about performance and security when you design a feature, so problems are caught early.
• Spot technical debt, raise it and help fix it.

Delivery

• Plan and deliver features end-to-end, managing your own time and raising risks early.
• Work out dependencies and unknowns at the start and deal with them before they hold things up.
• Check your work in production and watch for regressions after release.
• Keep work moving when things are unclear, and ask the questions you need to get answers.
• Give estimates you can stick to, and update them when the scope changes.

Impact

• Be someone your team relies on to get work done.
• Help junior engineers with technical questions, pair with them and give them feedback.
• Take part in hiring by running technical interviews and giving clear feedback on candidates.
• Suggest ways the team could work better, and see the change through if you're asked to lead it.
• Take part in team planning and help decide what goes into the backlog.

Communication

• Explain things in a way that suits who you're talking to, with more detail for engineers and less for everyone else.
• Speak up in design reviews, retros and sprint planning.
• Give clear, specific and kind feedback in code reviews.
• If you disagree with something, say so early and professionally.
• Let your Engineering Team Lead know early when a piece of work is falling behind, rather than letting it surface late.

AI and Innovation

• Use AI coding tools such as Claude in your day-to-day work, while you stay in charge of the design decisions.
• Review AI-written code to the same standard as your own, and check that generated tests actually test the requirement.
• Follow the team's agreed approach to using AI, and update the guidance for your area when your changes make it out of date.

Requirements

Essential

• Solid, hands-on experience in Java (preferably Java 25+) and Spring Boot.
• Good relational database skills, ideally PostgreSQL, including working with schemas and migrations.
• Experience designing and delivering features from planning through to production.
• Experience writing unit, integration and contract tests.
• Comfortable working within an existing architecture and set of patterns.
• A good understanding of secure coding and how to write code that performs well.
• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines (for example Jenkins).
• Able to explain technical work clearly to engineers and non-technical colleagues.
• Comfortable getting on with work when the requirements are not fully clear.

Desirable

• Experience using AI coding tools such as Claude well as part of day-to-day engineering.
• An understanding of what it takes to build software in a financial environment.
• Some experience monitoring and debugging services (for example Prometheus, Grafana).
• Experience working with cloud-hosted systems on AWS.
• Exposure to React and TypeScript, enough to work sensibly with patterns defined.
• Familiarity with tools such as Keycloak for identity and AWS S3 for storage.
• Experience helping more junior engineers or taking part in technical interviews.

What's Important to Us

Our passion is tech, but the people we bring together are the heart of the business. Over the years we've recruited a fairly eclectic bunch, with hobbies from gaming to ultra-marathon running, snowboarding to chess, hiking to climbing. What we share are our values:

• Teamwork
• Merit
• Develop
• Honest
• Impactful
• Integrity

They might look like corporate jargon, but they mean something to us. If they sound like you, get in touch. There's a good chance you'd be a great fit.

Benefits

• Discretionary bonus
• 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
• Opportunity to purchase additional annual leave
• 1 day birthday leave
• 1 day charity leave
• Private health insurance
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
• Season ticket loan for transport
• Eye care
• Pension (3% / 5% contribution)
• Salary sacrifice schemes (cycle to work and electric vehicle)
• Monthly socials
• Charity events