3 months ago
Remote, EMEASenior
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain Java/Spring Boot backend services and APIs.
- Own a backend domain end-to-end and influence its architectural evolution.
- Design REST APIs with appropriate versioning, error handling, idempotency, and pagination.
- Drive architecture discussions, propose designs, write Architectural Decision Records, and defend technical choices.
- Write unit and integration tests using appropriate testing levels and review pull requests for correctness, design, maintainability, performance, and coverage.
- Maintain API specifications, service READMEs, and system runbooks using OpenAPI/Swagger documentation.
- Contribute to shared libraries and platform standards with cross-squad value.
- Use AI/LLM tooling for code generation, test writing, debugging, and documentation.
- Uphold peer review, branching, CI, secrets-management, and OWASP-related engineering standards.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of professional backend software engineering experience, including at least 3 years of production Java experience involving design decisions.
- Strong Java and Spring Boot knowledge, including dependency injection, Spring Security, Spring Data, transaction management, and Spring Test.
- Experience designing and operating REST APIs and relational databases, including schemas, indexing, and query optimization.
- Production experience with distributed systems concepts including eventual consistency, idempotency, retries, circuit breakers, and failure-mode design.
- Experience writing unit tests with JUnit and Mockito and integration tests using a real database.
- Strongly preferred experience with event-driven architecture and Kafka, including consumer groups, offset management, and delivery semantics.
- Experience with microservices architecture, service discovery, API gateways, inter-service communication, and distributed tracing.
- Familiarity with AWS environments without requiring infrastructure ownership.
- Kotlin experience or willingness to learn an additional JVM language.
- Fintech, payments, or financial-services experience, including reconciliation, payment-flow idempotency, and audit logging, is preferred.
- Ability to work autonomously, communicate design decisions, produce maintainable code, and contribute constructively to technical reviews.
Tech Stack
Categories
About watu
Watu is a Nairobi-headquartered asset finance company that provides loans for mobility and connectivity assets, such as motorcycles and smartphones, to unbanked and underserved consumers and micro-entrepreneurs. It earns revenue from loan interest and fees and supports digital repayments and compliance services around the financed assets. Founded in 2015, Watu operates in eight African countries and reports issuing over 2 million loans.