AI First Engineer – Senior to Lead

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in South Africa.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of intricate systems throughout their lifecycle: design, build, test, deploy, and manage Java/Spring Boot microservices with defined contracts and SLOs.

• Oversee AI-assisted coding: prompt, assess, validate, and strengthen AI-generated outputs using robust engineering judgment.

• Engineer for resilience by utilizing patterns such as circuit breakers, retries, rate limiting, and load balancing.

• Implement enterprise integration patterns including pub/sub, producer-consumer, message buses, and API gateways.

• Deliver consistently on Clean Code, SOLID principles, and established Design Patterns across various services.

• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules, and secure delivery workflows.

• Champion TDD/BDD with extensive test suites (unit, contract, integration, end-to-end, and stress testing).

• Establish meaningful observability through metrics, logs, and traces for effective production debugging and stability.

• Employ strong security practices, such as OIDC/JWT-based authentication, secret management, and least-privilege design.

• Collaborate across web and mobile platforms (native Android/iOS or modern Web applications) to ensure cohesive full-stack alignment.

• Create solutions that are compliant with regulated environments, featuring robust auditability and compliance controls.

⛳️ Requirements

• 6–10+ years of practical software engineering experience, particularly with Java and Spring Boot.

• Experience in production environments building distributed microservices using open-source tools.

• Strong familiarity with Kafka (or similar), Keycloak (or any modern Identity Access Management), Docker, and Kubernetes.

• Comprehensive understanding of contemporary architectures: microservices, event-driven systems, serverless, and API-first delivery.

• Extensive experience with SQL and NoSQL data modeling and performance optimization.

• Strong exposure to CI/CD and DevOps practices (Terraform/Bicep, Git-based workflows, secure pipelines).

• Advanced skills in TDD/BDD and structured automated testing methodologies.

• Practical experience with observability tools (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).

• Ability to critically analyze and validate AI-generated code and system designs.

• Comfortable working with backend-heavy systems while collaborating on web and mobile platforms.

🏝️ Benefits

• Opportunities for professional development.

• Flexible working hours.

• Options for remote work.