A large public sector organisation maintains citizen-facing online services and is migrating backend components to containerised microservices on Azure AKS. The role sits in a cross-functional Agile team delivering RESTful APIs and single-page frontends, working hands-on with Java 11/21, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Docker and React.
The mission
The team is a development squad of around eight engineers responsible for approximately 40 microservices that support several core business flows used by hundreds of thousands of transactions per month. The current initiative is to stabilise production deployments on AKS, improve CI/CD pipelines, and design a consistent API layer using OpenAPI and Swagger.
Day to day you will own the technical design and delivery of backend services. You will define service boundaries, implement Spring Boot microservices, secure APIs with Spring Security, and run them on AKS. You will work closely with product analysts, frontend developers and the scrum master to translate functional requirements into tested, deployable components and provide regular status updates to stakeholders.
Your responsibilities
- Lead the technical design and architecture for Java-based microservices, delivering clear API contracts using OpenAPI/Swagger.
- Implement production-quality services and integrations, using Spring Boot, Hibernate and RESTful APIs to meet functional and non-functional requirements.
- Automate and maintain CI/CD pipelines with Maven/Gradle, unit tests (JUnit) and container builds to ensure repeatable deployments to AKS.
- Operate and tune containerised workloads on Kubernetes, using Docker images, liveness/readiness probes and resource limits for stable production behaviour.
- Collaborate with platform and cloud engineers to integrate Azure services such as Event Hub, Service Bus and Cosmos DB into event-driven flows.
- Mentor junior developers, run technical working groups and promote coding standards, code reviews and architecture decisions.
Your profile
Essential skills
- Senior-level experience, typically 5+ years, developing enterprise applications in Java (Java 11 and Java 21).
- Proven track record building microservices with Spring Boot, Hibernate, Spring Security and RESTful API design.
- Practical experience with Kubernetes, AKS, Docker and container orchestration in production.
- Strong CI/CD skills using Maven or Gradle, Git based workflows and automated unit testing with JUnit.
- Comfortable working in Agile teams, communicating with analysts and stakeholders and giving technical feedback.
- Familiarity with IntelliJ, OpenAPI/Swagger and API contract testing.
Preferred skills
- Experience with ELK tools for logging and observability.
- Knowledge of Sparx Enterprise Architect and Tomcat.