AWS Cloud-Native Java / EKS Engineer

The AWS Cloud-Native Java / EKS Engineer will design, build, deploy and support organisational Java-based APIs, integration services and microservices on AWS. The resource must combine strong software-engineering discipline with hands-on Kubernetes and EKS capability and must be able to diagnose failures across application, container, cluster, network and external-integration layers.

What you'll do:

• Design, develop, test and maintain Java and Spring Boot services supporting company digital channels and airline business processes.
• Build and maintain REST and SOAP integrations with Amadeus, airline partners, internal systems, payment, notification, loyalty and operational services.
• Containerise services using Docker and deploy, configure and operate workloads on Amazon EKS and Kubernetes.
• Create and maintain Helm charts, manifests, configuration, secrets, health probes, resource limits, autoscaling and deployment strategies.
• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines using approved source control, build, quality, security, container registry and deployment tooling.
• Apply secure coding, dependency management, vulnerability remediation, least-privilege access, encryption and secrets-management practices.
• Implement observability using structured logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards and alerts; support capacity planning and proactive reliability improvements.
• Troubleshoot production issues across JVM, application, database, API, DNS, TLS, network, load-balancer, ingress, pod and cluster layers.
• Participate in code reviews, automated testing, static analysis, performance testing, release planning and technical documentation.
• Provide on-call or scheduled production support where required and contribute to incident reports, root-cause analysis and permanent fixes.
• Collaborate with architects, mobile and web developers, cloud/platform teams, security teams and external airline technology vendors.
• Transfer implementation and operational knowledge to company technical personnel and maintain runbooks and support documentation.

Your experience

• A minimum of 5 years' professional Java software-development experience in enterprise or high-availability transactional environments.
• Strong production experience with Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, SOAP services, JSON/XML, JPA/Hibernate and relational databases.
• Demonstrable hands-on experience deploying and supporting production workloads on AWS, Amazon EKS and Kubernetes.
• Demonstrable experience with Docker, Helm, container registries, CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment practices.
• Experience with AWS services relevant to the SAA estate, including EKS, EC2, ECR, IAM, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, load balancing, networking and security controls.
• Experience in monitoring, production troubleshooting, incident response, performance analysis and root-cause resolution for distributed services.
• Experience integrating with external enterprise platforms using authenticated, high-volume and business-critical interfaces.
• Prior airline, travel, loyalty, e-commerce or similarly regulated high-availability transactional experience is required; direct airline integration experience is preferred.
• Required technical competencies
• Java language fundamentals, concurrency, JVM diagnostics, memory and performance tuning, exception handling and resilient integration patterns.
• Spring Boot, Spring MVC, validation, security, configuration, scheduling, data access and service-to-service communication.
• API engineering including contract design, versioning, idempotency, authentication, error handling, timeouts, retries, circuit breakers and audit logging.
• Kubernetes/EKS workload design including deployments, services, ingress, probes, resource management, autoscaling, rolling releases and pod-level diagnostics.
• AWS security and operations including IAM, VPC/network concepts, certificates, secrets, logging, monitoring, alerting and infrastructure governance.
• Engineering quality including unit and integration testing, mocking, code review, static analysis, dependency scanning, build automation and release traceability.

Qualifications:

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering or a related discipline, or a relevant tertiary qualification supported by equivalent professional experience.
• A current AWS certification relevant to solution architecture, development or operations. Evidence of certification must be submitted with the bid.

Expected deliverables

• Production-ready Java services and APIs meeting agreed functional and non-functional requirements.
• Version-controlled source code, automated tests, code-review evidence and technical documentation.
• Container images, Helm charts or Kubernetes manifests, configuration and repeatable deployment pipelines.
• Monitoring dashboards, alerts, operational runbooks and documented support procedures.
• Release notes, implementation evidence and rollback procedures for production deployments.
• Incident analysis, defect remediation, performance improvements and knowledge-transfer outputs.

Other information applicable to the opportunity:

• Contract position
• Location: Johannesburg