Senior to Lead AI First Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Take ownership of intricate systems from start to finish: design, construct, test, deploy, and manage Java/Spring Boot microservices with well-defined contracts and service level objectives (SLOs).

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

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

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

• Consistently produce Clean Code, adhere to SOLID principles, and implement proven Design Patterns throughout services.

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

• Promote Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) with thorough test suites (unit, contract, integration, end-to-end, and stress testing).

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

• Implement robust security practices, including OIDC/JWT-based authentication, secret management, and least-privilege design principles.

• Collaborate across web and mobile platforms to ensure cohesive full-stack alignment.

• Create solutions that are suitable for regulated environments, ensuring strong auditability and compliance controls.

⛳️ Requirements

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

• Hands-on experience in building distributed microservices using open-source tools in production environments.

• Strong expertise with Kafka, Keycloak, Docker, and Kubernetes.

• Solid grasp of modern architectures: microservices, event-driven systems, serverless, and API-first delivery.

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

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

• Advanced knowledge of 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 architectures.

• Comfort in working with backend-heavy systems while also collaborating across web and mobile channels.

🏝️ Benefits

• Opportunities for professional development.

• Flexible work arrangements.