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.

Requirements

8+ years in Java backend with strong Spring Boot.

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.

Hands-on experience with at least one payment processor or gateway (e.g. MPGS, Cybersource or mada). This is a requirement for this role.

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

Experience with more than one payment processor / gateway.

Cloud platforms (OCI, AWS or Azure); event-driven systems (Kafka).