Senior Java Developer

We are seeking an experienced Senior Java Engineer to join our UK Digital Data & Cloud Practice. Our Digital Practice is expanding rapidly and you will have the opportunity to achieve medium and long-term career goals. You will be working for one of our high-profile trading clients within the financial services domain, contributing hands-on to a Java-based development team supporting a high-volume message processing environment.

The team is heavily Java-focused, operating within a client ecosystem that relies extensively on Kafka, Kubernetes/OpenShift, caching solutions, REST APIs, and high-throughput distributed systems. You will bring deep, practical experience in scaling systems that process millions of messages per day and strong problem-solving capability across complex backend challenges.

Responsibilities

Technical Delivery

• Design, develop, and maintain high-quality backend components in Java, with a focus on performance and resilience.
• Contribute hands-on to complex features across messaging, caching, and distributed processing layers.
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues related to sequencing, recovery, message failures, and large-volume processing.
• Support releases, deployments, and production stability activities.
• Adhere to CI/CD pipelines, code quality standards, and operational readiness requirements.
• Apply performance, security, and resilience best practices, particularly around large-scale message handling.

Collaboration

• Work closely with the Technical Lead and peers to deliver against team objectives.
• Contribute to technical discussions, design reviews, and knowledge sharing within the team.
• Raise risks, blockers, and progress updates clearly within the team.

Qualifications

• Experience working on trading or financial platforms that process millions of messages per day, with strong awareness of non-functional requirements such as latency, resiliency, throughput optimisation, failover handling, and backpressure management.
• Experience designing and developing cloud-native applications with a microservices architecture running on Docker/OpenShift/Kubernetes.
• Strong application development skills in Java, SQL (SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) and messaging platforms such as Kafka and MQ.
• Experience with the Spring framework and Spring Boot technologies.
• Experience in Java REST API development and application security best practices (OAuth, JWT, etc.).
• Experience with build and source control tools: Gradle, Maven, Git/Bitbucket.
• Experience with caching services such as Redis.
• Awareness of AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude to accelerate development, generate boilerplate, and review code.
• Ability to apply AI tooling critically - validating, refactoring, and integrating AI-generated code rather than accepting output uncritically.
• Awareness of prompt engineering techniques relevant to software development workflows (code generation, test writing, documentation, debugging).
• Experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment.