{"id":2423356,"url":"https://alion.io/job/scrums-com-senior-java-backend-engineer","title":"Senior Java Backend Engineer","company":{"id":57427,"name":"Scrums.com","domain":"scrums.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/scrums-com","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"services","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Schema","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":36,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":155,"computed_at":"2026-10-14T06:34:16Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"contractor","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Johannesburg, South Africa"],"countries":["ZA"],"hiring_countries":["ZA"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":38000,"max_usd":74000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_cell","sample_n":24},"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"Spring Boot","optional":false},{"name":"Spring Security","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-13T04:04:06Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-13","last_verified_at":"2026-10-14T14:19:44Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"Few engineers get to build a national-scale payments system from a blank page. This position puts you at the centre of a greenfield real-time settlement platform: a high-volume, event-driven service that authorises and settles instant payments against prefunded participant balances, and connects directly to national and regional settlement infrastructure.You will join a cross-functional delivery squad as a full member of the team, working from one shared backlog to one shared engineering standard. This is the highest-volume role on the programme, and the work sits squarely on the transactional path, where correctness, resilience and throughput matter most. If you have owned Kafka in production and want your code moving real money in real time, this is the role for you.\nResponsibilities\nDesign, build and test the prefunded balance engine, covering authorisation, settlement, funding and defunding against participant accounts\nImplement event-driven flows on Kafka with idempotency, exactly-once semantics where required, resilience patterns and full replay capability\nDevelop REST APIs governed by OpenAPI contracts for integration with clearing rails and settlement gateways\nImplement payment message handling and build the reconciliation interfaces to downstream settlement systems\nDesign transactional data models and tune them for throughput, treating correctness under concurrency as the first constraint\nRun performance and load testing against the defined throughput envelope, then diagnose and remediate the issues found\nWrite automated tests as a core part of the definition of done, not as an afterthought\nContribute to code reviews, technical design discussions and the continuous improvement of engineering standards\nPair with the in-house engineering team and document work as it lands, keeping knowledge transfer continuous\nSupport production readiness through observability, monitoring and clear operational runbooks\nExperience and education\nMust-Have\n7+ years of experience building backend services in Java, with strong command of Java 21 and Spring Boot 3.x\nProven experience owning Kafka in production at high volume, including design, tuning and operational support. Depth here is the primary screening criterion\nDemonstrable experience on systems where correctness under load and failure was critical, such as payments, ledgers, trading or telco billing\nStrong SQL skills and solid understanding of transactional design and concurrency control\nExperience designing and delivering REST APIs using OpenAPI specifications\nHands-on experience deploying and running services on AWS\nA disciplined approach to automated testing across unit, integration and contract levels\nBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent demonstrable experience\nAdvantageous\nPayments or financial services domain experience (strongly preferred)\nKnowledge of ISO 20022 payment messaging standards\nExperience with Amazon MSK\nExposure to Kubernetes and containerised deployments\nExperience with Spring Security\nFamiliarity with observability tooling for metrics, logging and tracing\nPerformance and load testing experience on high-throughput systems","description_format":"text","description_chars":3191,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":true},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"South Africa","iso":"ZA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT Outsourcing & Dedicated Teams","Custom Software Development"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-13T06:19:39Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":155,"reasons":["conf:5","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-14T06:34:16Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/scrums-com-senior-java-backend-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/scrums-com-senior-java-backend-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-14T14:56:12Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":18619,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-15T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":57427},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=57427"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fscrums-com-senior-java-backend-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fscrums-com-senior-java-backend-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fscrums-com-senior-java-backend-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/scrums-com-senior-java-backend-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fscrums-com-senior-java-backend-engineer"}]}