Johannesburg: Backend Developer

Purpose of the Role: At Dis-Chem Life, we are building systems that protect lives, accelerate innovation, and drive digital transformation at scale. As our Backend Engineer, you will design and build the core services, platforms, and APIs that power every product we deliver and every life we cover. This is not a role for the average engineer. We are looking for someone who blends elite backend architecture with craftsmanship, operational excellence, and a startup-hardened mindset. Your mission: to architect, implement, and operate secure, scalable, and high-performance backend systems that enable faster, safer, and smarter product delivery. You will collaborate with product managers, frontend engineers, other backend engineers, data scientists, actuaries, and DevOps to deliver domain-rich services, enable event-driven integrations, and ensure our systems are observable, reliable, and built for change. Role Summary This role is responsible for designing, developing, and operating Dis-Chem Life’s backend platforms and services to enable rapid, reliable, and scalable software delivery. The Backend Engineer will lead the implementation of domain-driven, cloud-native architectures; define and evolve service boundaries; and deliver high-quality APIs and data pipelines that underpin the resilience and efficiency of our technology landscape. To succeed, you must be highly proficient in backend software design, test driven development, distributed systems, API development, and secure data handling. You will take full ownership of service performance, reliability, code quality, and production operations—ensuring our systems run at enterprise scale while enabling agility and innovation. This role demands a technically strong, self-driven engineer with deep backend experience and the ability to collaborate across engineering, data, and product teams. Key Responsibilities Backend Architecture & Development Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performing backend services and APIs. Lead the adoption of domain-driven design (DDD), clean architecture, and SOLID principles. Implement robust data models and persistence strategies with strong consistency and performance characteristics. Build event-driven and asynchronous workflows using messaging/streaming platforms. Establish API standards, versioning strategies, and documentation practices. Reliability, Performance & Operations Drive performance optimisation through profiling, caching, indexing, and query optimisation. Embed observability across services: structured logging, metrics, tracing, SLIs/SLOs, and error budgets. Champion testing excellence: unit, property-based, contract, integration, and load testing. Own production readiness: blue/green or canary releases, graceful degradation, and robust rollback paths. Partner with SRE/DevOps to ensure secure, automated deployments and operational excellence. Security & Compliance Implement secure coding practices and threat-aware designs (input validation, least privilege, encryption in transit/at rest). Manage identity, auth, and access patterns (OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, mTLS, fine-grained authorisation). Ensure data governance and privacy controls aligned to regulatory and internal standards. Collaboration & Delivery Work closely with product and stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical designs and iterative delivery plans. Mentor engineers, conduct code and design reviews, and raise the quality bar across the codebase. Drive continuous improvement of engineering practices, tooling, and standards. Technical Skills Essential: Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages and ecosystems (e.g., Java/Kotlin with Spring Boot, C#/.NET, Go, or Python/FastAPI). Deep experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs and building resilient, idempotent endpoints; exposure to gRPC or GraphQL. Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts: consistency, partitioning, resiliency patterns (circuit breakers, retries, backoff), eventual consistency. Data stores: relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and at least one NoSQL store (e.g., DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis); schema design, indexing, and migration strategies. Messaging and streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS, RabbitMQ) and event-driven architecture. Testing: unit, integration, contract (e.g., Pact), end-to-end, and performance/load testing. Observability: metrics, logs, and tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, CloudWatch/X-Ray). Secure development practices, secrets management, and API security patterns. Comfortable with containerisation (Docker) and deploying to Kubernetes/EKS or equivalent. Beneficial: Experience with CQRS and event sourcing where appropriate. Knowledge of caching layers and patterns (Redis, CDN, application-level caches). Experience with feature flags, canary releasing, and progressive delivery. Exposure to serverless components (e.g., AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions) and microservices at scale. Familiarity with data pipelines and analytics integrations for downstream consumers. Understanding of financial services domains or actuarial/data integrations. Soft Skills Ownership-driven, autonomous, and accountable. Thrives in fast-paced, entrepreneurial environments; bias for action and outcomes. Exceptional problem-solving with a performance and reliability mindset. Strong written and verbal communication; able to collaborate across technical and non-technical teams. Passionate about craftsmanship, documentation, and continuous improvement. Experience 6 years’ experience building and operating backend systems in production. Proven track record designing and maintaining high-scale, mission-critical services in cloud environments (AWS preferred). Experience delivering greenfield systems and evolving legacy platforms incrementally. Demonstrated impact in agile, product-led, high-stakes settings. Prior experience in regulated or financial services environments is advantageous. Qualifications Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent practical experience). Relevant certifications beneficial (e.g., AWS Certified Developer/Solutions Architect; domain-specific security certifications). Nice-to-Have AWS Alignment Services: EC2, EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, ALB/NLB, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, Kinesis, ElastiCache/Redis, Secrets Manager, Cognito, CloudWatch, X-Ray. Practices: Infrastructure-as-Code collaboration with DevOps (Terraform/CloudFormation), cost-aware designs, and security-first architectures aligned to CIS and IAM best practices. What Success Looks Like Measurable improvements in latency, throughput, and error rates against defined SLOs. Clearly defined and documented service boundaries with stable, versioned APIs. Robust test coverage and automated quality gates in CI/CD. Zero-trust principles applied across services with least-privilege access and strong auditability. Predictable, low-risk deployments and fast, reliable incident recovery.