Lead Backend Engineer

Job description

A hands-on engineering lead who sets technical direction, owns code quality, and builds payment-critical backend services on a modern Java stack, while guiding and growing a team of backend engineers. What you'll do • Provide hands-on technical leadership for backend engineering on a modern Java / Spring Boot stack. • Design and build payment-critical backend services and APIs. • Own code quality: standards, code review, testing and release readiness. • Ensure correctness, reliability and security across the services the team owns. • Mentor and grow backend engineers, and work closely with architecture and product. • Proven technical leadership while remaining hands-on in the code. • Hands-on payments / fintech experience is required - you have worked on real payment or financial-transaction systems. • Strong microservices, REST API design, relational databases and automated testing. • Delivery on containers (Kubernetes) with CI/CD. • AI-augmented engineering - you actively use AI coding tools such as Claude Code in your day-to-day development. This is a requirement for this role. Nice to have • Cloud platforms (OCI, AWS or Azure), event-driven systems (Kafka)

Requirements

• 8+ years in Java backend with strong Spring Boot.
• Hands-on experience with at least one payment processor or gateway (e.g. MPGS, Cybersource or mada). This is a requirement for this role.
• Experience with more than one payment processor / gateway.

Skills