Senior Java Team Lead (Payments)

Job Title: Senior Java Team Lead (Payments)
Company: VCG Tech Limited
Location: Remote (Global)
Employment Type: Full-Time

Role Purpose
You will lead the team that builds and runs our payments platform, the systems that move client money in and out of an online trading business. This covers deposit and withdrawal orchestration, integration with multiple third-party payment service providers, payout flows, and reconciliation. This is money-movement software, so correctness, idempotency, traceability and reliability are the standard, not aspirations. You own the architecture, the technical direction and the delivery accountability for a domain where a single mishandled transaction is a real problem for a real client.
This is a hands-on, coding team lead role. You will spend meaningful time in a Java and Spring Boot microservices codebase, with enough React and TypeScript to lead a fullstack team across the payment journeys clients and operations staff actually use. Day to day you balance writing and reviewing code, shaping the architecture, and growing the engineers around you, working closely with product, operations and other engineering teams to ship reliable payment flows. The team works remotely and you report to the CTO.

Key Responsibilities
Architecture and money-movement correctness
Own the architecture of deposit, withdrawal, payout and reconciliation services across a Java microservices backend
Design transaction flows that are idempotent, auditable and safe under retries, timeouts and partial failures
Define how state transitions, ledgering and reconciliation guarantee that money is never lost, duplicated or stranded
Set the standards for data consistency, event-driven messaging and failure handling across the team
Drive technical decisions on resilience, observability and recovery for critical payment paths

Hands-on delivery
Write, review and merge production code in Java and Spring Boot, leading by example on quality
Build and maintain REST APIs and event-driven integrations between payment services
Contribute to the React and TypeScript front end for client and operations payment journeys
Keep CI/CD, automated testing and deployment pipelines healthy and fast
Tackle the hardest or highest-risk parts of the work yourself when it matters most

Provider integration and reliability
Lead integration with multiple third-party payment service providers behind a clean internal abstraction
Design provider routing, fallback and retry behaviour that stays correct when a provider degrades or fails
Build reconciliation between internal records and provider settlements to detect and resolve discrepancies
Own monitoring, alerting and on-call readiness for payment flows using observability tooling
Lead incident response for payment issues and turn root causes into lasting fixes

Team leadership and delivery
Lead, mentor and grow a team of backend and fullstack engineers
Own planning, prioritisation and delivery commitments for the payments roadmap
Run pragmatic code review, design review and engineering practices that keep quality high
Partner with product, operations and other teams to translate needs into reliable delivery
Be accountable for the team's output, timelines and the operational health of what you ship

Required Experience & Skills
Proven team-management experience is essential - you have directly led a team of engineers as their team lead, owning day-to-day coordination, planning, 1:1s, mentoring, performance and growth, and the team's delivery, while remaining hands-on with code
8+ years building backend systems in Java, with deep Spring Boot and microservices experience
Strong track record building systems where correctness and reliability are critical, ideally involving money movement, transactions or other high-integrity data
Practical mastery of idempotency, retries, distributed transactions and failure handling in distributed systems
Strong SQL and relational database skills, including data modelling for transactional and reconciliation workloads
Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures and message queues
Experience designing and operating REST APIs and integrating with third-party providers at scale
Working proficiency in React and TypeScript, enough to lead a fullstack team and contribute to the front end
Solid experience running services on AWS with Docker, CI/CD and Git-based workflows
Clear communicator who can drive technical decisions and align engineering with product and operations

Nice to Have
Experience in payments, payment orchestration or integrating multiple payment service providers
Background in reconciliation, ledgering or settlement systems
Experience in fintech, brokerage or online trading domains
Familiarity with KYC/AML and fraud-prevention concepts at a generic level
Kubernetes experience for deploying and operating microservices
Infrastructure-as-code experience, for example Terraform
Hands-on experience with observability tooling such as Grafana, Prometheus or CloudWatch
Comfortable working in a remote, product-team-oriented engineering organisation