Senior Software Engineer (Java)

Senior Software Engineer - 6 Month Contract

Start Date: ASAP

Rate: Market rates, outside ir35

Contract Length: 6 months

Location: Manchester, hybrid

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services using Java, aligning with best practices for performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Work with containerisation/orchestration technologies (Kubernetes) to deploy, manage, and scale services.
• Develop and maintain systems on Cloud Platform, leveraging cloud-native capabilities.
• Implement and manage message streaming / queuing architectures using Kafka (or similar), ensuring high throughput, resilience, and fault tolerance.
• Contribute to CI/CD processes: build pipelines, automated testing, code reviews.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with architects, DevOps/SRE, QA to define technical roadmap, troubleshoot production issues, and ensure observability.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong and proven experience in Java, Spring Boot, in enterprise-scale backend systems.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, deploying microservices in production.
• Solid working knowledge of Cloud Platforms, including networking, storage, services like GKE, Pub/Sub, etc.
• In depth experience with Kafka: setting up clusters, producers/consumers, tuning, fault handling.
• Experience with microservices architecture, REST APIs, and distributed systems.
• Strong CI/CD and DevOps mindset; experience with automated testing, monitoring, logging, observability.
• Ability to work in agile environment; strong communication skills.