Cape Town: Back End Senior Software Engineer (Java (Spring Boot), AWS, Kubernetes, Microservices, Kafka) – CPT posted by DataFin Recruitment

ENVIRONMENT:

Our client is a leading platform in the shipping industry that addresses the critical issue of contract fulfilment for carriers, shippers, and NVOCCs. Its mission is to unite these stakeholders through shared digital infrastructure, enhancing performance while reducing manual workloads. The company is seeking a Back End Staff Software Engineer for a senior-level role focused on delivering high-quality, scalable, and secure software products and applications. This position directly impacts the companys success by driving technical excellence, fostering collaboration, and ensuring on-time project delivery through the design of technical solutions and hands-on development of key product features. In this role, the individual is expected to demonstrate a strong sense of ownership, build trust within cross-functional teams, and embody the companys core values through impactful technical contributions and leadership.

DUTIES:

Technical Leadership

• Architected, designed, and implemented complex systems ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Took ownership of technical deliverables from ideation through to production, including writing efficient, secure, and testable code.
• Ensured code quality by achieving 85%+ test coverage for new code and improving coverage for existing systems.

Delivery & Execution

• Led by example to deliver high-quality, on-time, and complete software solutions.
• Created clear technical designs and estimates, collaborating with engineering leadership on feature delivery planning.
• Identified, tracked, and resolved technical debt, vulnerabilities, and defects prior to release.
• Minimized critical defects through design-time impact analysis, test planning, and execution.
• Ensured observability through instrumentation and alerting to support continuous improvement.

Collaboration & Planning

• Partnered with product managers, engineering directors, and team leads to design, estimate, prioritise, and plan work.
• Defined clear acceptance criteria, solution designs, and testing standards for deliverables.
• Improved team efficiency through shared ownership of metrics and data-driven insights.

System Optimisation & Performance

• Optimised system performance and scalability by identifying bottlenecks and implementing improvements.
• Maintained focus on application health, uptime, and system observability.

Definition of Ready (DoR)

• Collaborated with product and engineering teams to ensure clear understanding of business requirements.
• Prepared designs and estimates ahead of sprint planning to support backlog prioritisation.
• Promoted adoption of Definition of Ready (DoR) to enhance delivery success and engineering excellence.

Stakeholder Engagement & Decision-Making

• Facilitated constructive discussions and debates on requirements, architecture, and acceptance criteria.
• Challenged stakeholders respectfully to ensure well-defined requirements and effective solution design.
• Advocated for rigorous testing, structured release strategies, and strong planning to ensure successful delivery.

REQUIREMENTS:

Tech Stack (Back End Focus)

Languages & Frameworks

• Main Tech Stack – Java (Spring Boot) + Microservices + AWS + Kubernetes + Kafka
• Java (primary) with deep experience in Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, and Spring Data
• Hibernate / JPA for ORM, transaction management, and persistence patterns
• Python for backend services, automation, data processing, or supporting systems
• Strong experience designing and evolving RESTful and event-driven APIs
• Familiarity with JVM performance tuning, memory management, and concurrency

Architecture & Backend Systems

• Microservices and service-oriented architectures
• Event-driven systems using messaging platforms such as Kafka
• API versioning, backward compatibility, and contract-driven development
• Experience designing systems for scalability, fault tolerance, and high availability

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Strong experience with AWS (e.g., EC2, ECS, EKS, S3, RDS, Aurora)
• Containerization using Docker and orchestration with Kubernetes
• Infrastructure-aware application design (timeouts, retries, backpressure, resilience)

Data & Storage

• Relational databases such as PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora
• Strong understanding of schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, and transactions
• Experience with data migration strategies and backward-compatible schema evolution

CI/CD & Engineering Tooling

• CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or similar tooling
• Experience with automated backend testing (unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end)
• Familiarity with JIRA-based agile workflows (epics, stories, delivery tracking)

Monitoring, Observability & Reliability

• Backend observability using tools such as DataDog, New Relic, and CloudWatch
• Experience instrumenting services with metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing
• Ability to define and monitor SLIs/SLOs for backend systems

Security & Quality

• Secure coding practices for backend systems
• Experience with SAST/DAST tools such as SonarQube, AWS Inspector, Black Duck or similar
• Familiarity with authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth2, JWT, service-to-service auth)

Required Qualifications:

Experience:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a minimum of 4 years in a senior or staff engineering role. Proven experience with designing and delivering purpose-built products and service-oriented applications at scale.

Technical Expertise:

• Strong knowledge of web applications, microservices, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native product development. Proficiency with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices.

Collaboration & Leadership:

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills. Proven ability to mentor junior engineers and influence technical decision-making across teams. Able to break high-level initiatives down into tasks for a team to consume.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in building SaaS products, especially with a focus on high performing applications and services.
• Knowledge of security best practices (e.g., OWASP Top 10) and familiarity with modern authentication systems (e.g., OAuth, SAML).