Senior Software Engineer (Java), (Hybrid, Cracow)

Svitla Systems Inc. is looking for a Senior Software Engineer with Java for a full-time position (40 hours per week) in Poland. Our client is one of the largest food retailers in the world, operating thousands of stores in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Europe. The company operates through multi-format stores and online. It operates stores in various formats differentiated by size and range of products sold, including large, small, dotcom only, and one-stop. They offer fresh food, drinks, bakery, grocery, home and entertainment products, baby products, clothing, household appliances, frozen food, pets, health and beauty products, consumer electronics, and electrical goods. It also provides consultancy, retail banking, and insurance services. The company was founded in 1919 and is headquartered in Welwyn Garden City, the UK.

You will join the Marketing Automation team, part of the client’s Customer API platform within the Communication domain. You will design, build, and operate event-driven microservices and data pipelines on Azure that connect millions of customers with personalised marketing experiences across channels, while leading architectural decisions, mentoring fellow engineers, and shaping the team’s engineering standards. The team follows a DevOps philosophy, with full ownership from commit to production, on-call support, and continuous delivery, and engineers rotate to the Platform team to deepen their infrastructure expertise.

• Hybrid mode with 3 days per week working from the office in Kraków.

Tech stack:

• Language: Java 25.
• Framework: Spring Boot 4.
• Build: Gradle.
• Messaging and streaming: Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hubs.
• Databases: PostgreSQL (primary), Redis as needed (NoSQL).
• Cloud: Microsoft Azure.
• Container orchestration: Kubernetes (AKS), Helm.
• Infrastructure as code: Terraform.
• CI/CD: Azure DevOps.
• Source control: GitHub Enterprise.
• Observability: New Relic (APM, alerting), Splunk, xMatters.
• Architecture: Microservices.
• AI tooling: OpenCode (Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus; GPT 5.5, 5.6, and 6).
• Issue tracking: Jira, Zendesk.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience delivering production Java applications.
• Strong command of Java 25 features and idioms (records, sealed classes, virtual threads, pattern matching).
• Solid experience with Spring Boot, including dependency injection, REST, data access, and testing.
• Proven solutioning skills: the ability to design simpler, maintainable solutions for complex business needs, not just technically correct ones.
• Proficiency in writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code, applying best practices in software design and deployment.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures and messaging systems such as Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hubs, RabbitMQ, Kafka, or equivalent.
• Practical experience with cloud platforms (Microsoft Azure preferred; AWS or GCP also valued).
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL or equivalent), including schema design, query optimisation, and migration tools (Flyway or Liquibase).
• Experience implementing test strategies (unit, integration, and regression), including defining the approach rather than just writing tests.
• Demonstrated ability to own and lead the technical delivery of a project or service, including architectural decisions, stakeholder coordination, and cross-team collaboration.
• Experience working with Agile methodologies (Scrum or Kanban).
• Strong written and verbal English communication skills.
• Proactive, ownership-driven mindset with a focus on quality, reliability, and security.

Will be a plus

Experience with Bash and Python 3

Responsibilities

Technical leadership and design

• Lead the design and architecture of platform capabilities and customer-facing integrations, contributing meaningfully to overall system architecture decisions.
• Collaborate with product managers and engineers across teams to define robust, scalable solutions that balance delivery speed with long-term maintainability.
• Drive architectural decisions for event-driven microservices, documenting choices as architecture decision records (ADRs), ensuring alignment on trade-offs, and sharing context widely.

Code and development

• Design, build, and maintain high-performance, reusable, and reliable microservices that integrate the client’s customer data with external marketing platforms.
• Develop and maintain event-driven solutions on Azure Service Bus and Azure Event Hubs, processing high-volume customer data streams reliably and at scale.
• Build and evolve gateway services, applying patterns such as gateway, outbox, and idempotent processing.
• Contribute to shared libraries and internal developer tooling that raise the quality bar across the team.
• Implement new features in production with full accountability for code quality, best practices, and operational readiness.

Engineering practices

• Define and implement test strategies (unit, integration, functional, and regression) to ensure consistent platform performance and confidence in every release.
• Champion CI/CD best practices using Azure DevOps pipelines, ensuring fast, reliable, and fully automated software delivery.
• Maintain high-quality documentation, including runbooks, API specs, system design documents, and operational guides.
• Mentor and support fellow engineers, conduct thorough code reviews, and actively shape the team’s engineering culture and standards.

Infrastructure and security

• Manage infrastructure as code using Terraform and Helm, deploying services to Kubernetes on Microsoft Azure.
• Collaborate with cloud platform and security teams to design secure, resilient services across private and public cloud environments.
• Write secure code: apply a layered defence model, follow DevSecOps practices, and treat security as a first-class concern alongside reliability and performance.
• Ensure observability by instrumenting services with New Relic APM, defining meaningful alerts, and owning the operational health of your systems.

Technology advocacy

• Discover, evaluate, and advocate for new technologies, proactively identifying tools, libraries, and patterns that can meaningfully improve team productivity or system quality.
• Leverage AI coding tools (e.g., Tabnine) to drive engineering efficiency, and help the team adopt these practices effectively.
• Automate workflows and build tooling to eliminate toil and enhance the developer experience.