Senior Backend Engineer (Java)

Location: Southampton, United Kingdom; hybrid, with office attendance once a quarter. Must be based in the UK or Ireland.

Salary: £70,000–£90,000 per year

Company

hirify.global builds online reward and employee benefits technology used by more than five million employees across over 3,000 organisations in more than 100 countries.

What you will do

• Design, build, and maintain REST APIs and backend services using Java and Spring Boot.
• Build event-driven workflows with Google Cloud Pub/Sub to synchronise profile data across products.
• Define provider integration experiences, APIs, events, data contracts, and event schemas for the Marketplace platform.
• Improve service performance, reliability, observability, logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.
• Collaborate with product, Platform, Data Engineering, Security, frontend, and mobile teams on secure, documented, and governed APIs and data flows.
• Contribute to architecture discussions, design reviews, incident retrospectives, testing strategy, CI/CD improvements, and engineering standards.

Requirements

• Experience building high-performance backend systems with Java and Spring Boot.
• Solid understanding of event-driven architecture and distributed system principles.
• Practical experience with messaging systems such as Google Cloud Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, or similar.
• Experience with NoSQL databases, ideally MongoDB Atlas.
• Comfort supporting production services in cloud environments.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines such as CircleCI, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
• Experience working in a fast-paced agile environment focused on flow efficiency, reducing work in progress, and completing stories.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.

Nice to have

• Experience mentoring engineers and supporting strong engineering practices.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience with Keycloak or other identity and authentication frameworks.
• Experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, or Prometheus.

Culture & Benefits

• AI-first engineering approach with opportunities to shape AI-assisted software development practices.
• Flexible hybrid setup with a choice of technology equipment and a £800 annual learning budget plus two weekly Focus Friday hours.
• 25 days of holiday plus local bank holidays, birthday leave, two half-day wellbeing days, and holiday buy-and-sell options.
• Healthcare cash plan, employee assistance support, income protection, life assurance, enhanced parental leave, and benefits discounts.
• £50 monthly hirify.global card allowance and a Work from Anywhere policy for up to 90 days.

Hiring process

• Initial informal call with the Talent team.
• 30-minute Engineering Manager interview, followed by a technical task and a 60-minute technical interview.
• Final 30–45-minute interview with the VP of Engineering.