TMA Proactive Partners - Backend Engineer

Back-End Developer is needed in South Africa.

Client: TMA Proactive Partners

Location: 0000, 30, ke

Contract: Freelance

Job Description

This is a remote position for an Intermediate Backend Engineer in a technology-led financial services organisation serving customers across Africa and international markets. The platform supports high-volume customer journeys, financial transactions, and partner integrations in a complex, distributed environment.

This role is suited to an engineer who can own a backend domain end to end. Responsibilities include writing production-grade Java code while considering service interactions, system failures, API consumption, data model impact on performance, and evolving architecture.

You will work remotely from South Africa/Africa/EU in a cross-functional engineering squad. Key responsibilities include:

• Designing, building, and maintaining backend services and APIs for internal teams, external partners, and customer-facing products.
• Owning the quality and reliability of services from solution design through deployment and production support.
• Writing unit and integration tests (TDD) as an integral part of development.
• Participating in architecture and system-design discussions with practical contributions.
• Reviewing pull requests for quality control and learning purposes.
• Creating and maintaining technical documentation, including OpenAPI specifications and operational runbooks.
• Contributing to shared libraries, reusable components, and platform standards.
• Taking part in backlog refinement, planning, stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives with accountability for squad outcomes.
• Utilizing AI and LLM tooling appropriately for enhancing coding, testing, debugging, and documentation processes.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of professional backend software engineering experience, including a minimum of 2 years using Java in a production environment.
• Strong Java and Spring Boot capabilities including dependency injection, Spring Security, Spring Data, transaction management, and testing with Spring Test.
• Sound REST API design knowledge covering versioning, error handling, idempotency, pagination, and backward compatibility.
• Experience designing and working with relational databases, including schema design, indexing, query optimization, and performance-aware data modeling.
• Understanding of distributed-systems concepts like eventual consistency, idempotency, retries, circuit breakers, and failure-mode thinking.
• Practical testing experience using JUnit and Mockito and familiarity with integration tests against a real database and the test pyramid.
• Ability to write clean, readable, maintainable code and explain technical decisions to peers.
• Production experience with event-driven architecture using Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent messaging platforms.
• Understanding of consumer groups, offset management, and delivery semantics such as at-least-once versus exactly-once.
• Experience in a microservices environment, covering service discovery, API gateways, inter-service communication, and distributed tracing.
• Familiarity with AWS and the runtime environment for backend services deployment.
• Experience with Docker and modern CI/CD practices.
• Exposure to Kotlin or another JVM language, or willingness to learn.
• Experience in fintech, payments, lending, insurance, or broader financial services is required.
• Understanding of reconciliation, idempotent payment flows, audit logging, and controls relevant to financial systems.

Application Process

Candidates must submit a current CV along with a brief note outlining their experience with Java, Spring Boot, backend architecture, and distributed systems online.