Java Backend Engineer
Summary
A 1-year contract in Edinburgh leading onshore delivery of Java backend services for a banking/financial services client: designing Spring Boot microservices and REST APIs, building Kafka event-driven services, and deploying on GCP with Docker, Kubernetes and Helm, while coordinating product, architecture and offshore teams.
1 year Contract
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the onshore technical delivery of Java backend services, coordinating across client, product, architecture and offshore engineering teams.
- Design and develop scalable, secure Java / Spring Boot microservices and REST APIs.
- Build and integrate event-driven services using Apache Kafka.
- Translate business requirements into technical designs, implementation plans, estimates and engineering backlogs.
- Lead technical discussions, impact assessments, code reviews and engineering governance.
- Guide engineers on implementation standards, reusable design patterns and secure coding practices.
- Drive engineering quality through BDD/TDD, JUnit, automated testing and CI/CD.
- Support cloud-native application deployment using GCP, Docker, Kubernetes and Helm.
- Coordinate integration testing, defect triage, release planning and production readiness.
- Work closely with Product Owners, Architects, DevOps, QA and offshore development teams.
- Identify technical risks, dependencies and blockers, ensuring timely resolution.
- Support production incidents, troubleshooting, root-cause analysis and long-term fixes.
- Maintain technical documentation, knowledge transfer and operational handover.
- Strong expertise in Spring, Spring Boot, REST APIs and Microservices.
- Experience designing and developing Kafka-based, event-driven applications.
- Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and cloud application deployment.
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes and Helm.
- Strong understanding of BDD/TDD, JUnit and automated unit testing.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Jenkins, Git and SonarQube.
- Knowledge of API gateways, API security and service-to-service integration.
- Strong understanding of software development lifecycle, release management and production readiness.
- Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments using Jira and Confluence.
- Proven experience leading technical delivery across distributed engineering teams.
- Strong client-facing communication, stakeholder management and technical leadership skills.
- Previous experience leading onshore/offshore engineering delivery.
- Experience within Banking / Financial Services.
- Knowledge of scalability, resilience, performance optimisation and observability.
- Experience with production support, incident management and root-cause analysis.
- Familiarity with cloud monitoring, logging and operational support.
- Understanding of banking integrations, payments, cards or customer-servicing platforms.
- Experience mentoring engineers and driving engineering best practices.
Skills
- Agile
- API
- Api Security
- BDD
- CI/CD
- Cloud
- Cloud Native
- Confluence
- Design Patterns
- DevOps
- Docker
- Event Driven Architecture
- GCP
- Git
- Helm
- Integration Testing
- Java
- Jenkins
- Jira
- JUnit
- Kafka
- Kubernetes
- Microservices
- Observability
- REST
- Root Cause Analysis
- Scrum
- Secure Coding
- SonarQube
- Spring
- Stakeholder Management
- TDD
- Test Automation
- Unit Testing