TMA Proactive Partners

Role Description This is a remote position. We are recruiting an Intermediate Backend Engineer for a technology-led financial services organisation serving customers across Africa and international markets. The platform supports high-volume customer journeys, financial transactions and partner integrations in a complex, distributed environment. This role is suited to an engineer who can own a backend domain end to end. You will write production-grade Java, but you will also think beyond the language: - How services interact - How systems fail - How APIs are consumed - How data models affect performance - How architecture should evolve over time You will work remotely from South Africa/Africa/EU in a cross-functional engineering squad. You will do the following: - Design, build and maintain backend services and APIs used by internal teams, external partners and customer-facing products. - Own the quality and reliability of the services you build, from solution design through deployment and production support. - Write unit and integration tests as a core part of development rather than treating testing as a separate QA activity (TDD). - Participate actively in architecture and system-design discussions, contributing practical and well-reasoned technical perspectives. - Review pull requests and use code review as both a quality control and a learning mechanism. - Create and maintain technical documentation, including OpenAPI specifications, service READMEs and operational runbooks. - Contribute to shared libraries, reusable components and platform standards where your work has value across squads. - Take part in backlog refinement, planning, stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives, with clear accountability for squad outcomes. - Use AI and LLM tooling appropriately for code generation, test creation, debugging, documentation and engineering productivity. Qualifications - At least 3 years of professional backend software engineering experience, including a minimum of 2 years using Java in a production environment. - Strong Java and Spring Boot capability, including dependency injection, Spring Security, Spring Data, transaction management and testing with Spring Test. - Sound REST API design knowledge, including versioning, error handling, idempotency, pagination and backward compatibility. - Experience designing and working with relational databases, including schema design, indexing, query optimisation and performance-aware data modelling. - A working understanding of distributed-systems concepts, including eventual consistency, idempotency, retries, circuit breakers and failure-mode thinking. - Practical testing experience using JUnit and Mockito, together with integration tests against a real database and an understanding of the test pyramid. - Ability to write clean, readable, maintainable code and to explain technical decisions clearly to other engineers. - Production experience with event-driven architecture using Kafka, RabbitMQ or an equivalent messaging platform. - Understanding of consumer groups, offset management and at-least-once versus exactly-once delivery semantics. - Experience in a microservices environment, including service discovery, API gateways, inter-service communication and distributed tracing. - Working familiarity with AWS and the runtime environment in which backend services are deployed. - Experience with Docker and modern CI/CD practices. - Exposure to Kotlin or another JVM language, or a willingness to learn. - Fintech, payments, lending, insurance or broader financial-services experience is required. - Understanding of reconciliation, idempotent payment flows, audit logging and other controls relevant to financial systems. Requirements - Candidates must submit a current CV together with a brief note outlining their experience with Java, Spring Boot, backend architecture and distributed systems online.