Lead Backend Engineer (Java / Spring Boot)

About the Role

We are looking for a Lead Backend Engineer to own the backend of a multi-tenant B2B platform end-to-end - from understanding the business problem and designing the data and service model, through implementation, testing, deployment and production support.

This is a hands-on lead role. You will write the hardest parts of the system yourself, set the engineering standards the team works to, and act as the technical point of reference for the engineers around you. You will work directly with the founders and with business stakeholders who own the requirements, which gives you the context, ownership and autonomy to make sound technical decisions.

You will not simply receive predefined development tickets. You will be expected to understand the underlying business problem, ask the right questions, identify gaps and edge cases, and translate requirements into reliable production-ready software - and to hold the rest of the team to the same standard. Getting the data model and the authorisation model right matters more here than shipping quickly.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the backend architecture: multi-tenancy model, authorization model, domain boundaries, and integration patterns.

• Translate business requirements into technical designs covering data models, API contracts, workflow states, authorization rules and system behaviour.

• Design for auditability from the start: immutable transaction histories, audit trails, and reporting over workflows where data integrity is critical.

• Build backend systems end to end: MySQL and PostgreSQL schemas and migrations, Spring Boot services, REST APIs, background processing and integrations.

• Design and integrate third-party services such as payment gateways, logistics and courier APIs, email, SMS and messaging platforms.

• Set and enforce engineering standards: coding standards, Git workflow, branching, pull requests, clean commit history.

• Review peer pull requests with a focus on correctness, security, performance, maintainability and consistency - and give feedback that makes the next PR better.

• Participate in hiring: interviewing, evaluating and onboarding the engineers who join the team.

• Communicate directly with non-technical stakeholders - clarify requirements, and explain technical constraints, risks and trade-offs in terms they can act on.

• Deploy, monitor, troubleshoot and support the systems you build.

• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, environment configuration, deployment automation and release process improvements.

• Maintain technical documentation covering APIs, schema decisions, configuration, operational procedures and runbooks.

Required Skills Experience

• 6+ years building and shipping production-grade backend systems, with at least part of that time as the senior or lead engineer on a system.

• Strong hands-on experience with Java 17/21, Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA and Spring Security.

• Deep PostgreSQL experience: schema design, indexing, query tuning, transactions, and safe migrations on tables with real data volume.

• Strong REST API design - versioning, pagination, request validation, error contracts, idempotency, and documentation.

• JUnit, Mockito and integration testing, as a habit rather than an afterthought.

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS applications.

• Experience with systems involving complex workflows, approvals, state machines or transactional data where correctness matters.

• Hands-on experience with message queues and asynchronous processing - Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS or equivalent - including retries, ordering, idempotent consumers and failure handling.

• Experience with event-driven patterns, background jobs and scheduled processing in production.

• Hands-on experience deploying, monitoring, debugging and troubleshooting applications on AWS (or GCP with a willingness to work primarily on AWS).

• Docker, and comfort owning CI/CD pipelines and environment configuration.

Good to Have

• React, JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML and CSS.

• Additional cloud experience (GCP or Azure) alongside AWS.

• Building reporting, analytics or data-intensive dashboards.

What We Look For

We value engineers who:

• Take ownership rather than waiting for detailed instructions.

• Think about the business problem, not just the technical implementation.

• Ask questions when requirements are unclear.

• Identify edge cases before they become production issues.

• Care about data correctness and system reliability.

• Can make pragmatic technical decisions and explain their trade-offs.

• Write maintainable code that other engineers can understand and extend.

Disclaimer: This job posting has been aggregated from external source. Role details, content, and availability are subject to change. Applicants are advised to confirm the latest information directly on the company website before applying.