Senior Java Engineer

We're looking for a Senior Java Engineer to join our team at Payforge and take technical ownership of reliable, scalable payments platforms. You'll design and build systems that power secure, high-performance transaction processing at scale, and help set the engineering standard for the teams you work with.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade applications using Java and Spring Boot, owning features end-to-end from design through production.
• Lead technical design for significant components — defining service boundaries, data models, integration patterns, and non-functional requirements.
• Partner with product managers, solution architects, and DevOps engineers to translate business needs into technical solutions, and challenge requirements where the technical trade-offs matter.
• Own application reliability, performance, and compliance with security and regulatory standards.
• Build and maintain integrations with external systems, APIs, and third-party providers.
• Write clean, testable, efficient code and raise the bar for those around you through best practices and established design principles.
• Drive improvements to CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, observability, and deployment processes.
• Lead code reviews, mentor mid-level and junior engineers, and act as a technical point of escalation.
• Participate in production incident response and root-cause analysis, closing the loop with durable fixes.
  
  

Skills & Experience

• Experience: 5+ years of professional Java development experience, including a track record of owning non-trivial systems in production.
• Strong knowledge of Java 21/25 (LTS) and Spring Boot 4 / Spring Framework 7 for building RESTful and event-driven microservices.
• Solid experience with Apache Kafka and asynchronous processing, including idempotency and exactly-once semantics.
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and ORM frameworks (Hibernate, JPA).
• Strong API design skills (REST, OpenAPI) and integration best practices.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes, plus CI/CD tooling (Maven/Gradle, GitHub Actions, Helm, Terraform).
• Strong testing discipline: JUnit 5, Mockito, Testcontainers, and production observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Working knowledge of security concepts: encryption, OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, mTLS, HSM integration, and tokenization.
• Practical use of AI coding assistants and LLMs in the development workflow, with the judgement to validate their output.
• Experience mentoring engineers, leading code reviews, and working in distributed teams.
  
  

What we value

• Precision & reliability – building software that meets the highest standards for performance and accuracy.
• Security-first mindset – understanding and applying strong security practices throughout the development process.
• Adaptability – moving between domains, clients, and problem spaces without losing momentum.
• Collaboration – working effectively with diverse technical and business stakeholders across teams and geographies.
• Ownership & accountability – taking initiative to deliver high-quality, production-ready code.
• Technical leadership – lifting the standard of the whole team, not just your own output.
• Curiosity & innovation – staying up to date with emerging trends across the payments industry.
  
  

About Payforge

Payforge is a specialist professional-services company focused exclusively on payments and fintech. We help clients deliver high-quality, scalable technology solutions in an evolving global financial landscape.

Equal Opportunity Statement

Payforge is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds.