Hybrid Senior Java Engineer – Kafka, AWS & Spring Boot

Forward Role; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 96,000 - 138,000; Full time

Job summary

Forward Role is seeking a Senior Java Engineer to join a small team delivering backend services for an existing platform. The role is a 6-month contract, outside IR35, with in-office collaboration 2 days per week in Manchester.

You will build event-driven services on Kafka, deploy to AWS, review code, and work with product and engineering leads to turn requirements into features quickly. Strong Java 17+, Spring Boot, Kafka, AWS and microservices experience are essential.

Qualifications

• Strong commercial experience in Java (17+) and Spring Boot, ideally Spring Boot 3.
• Hands-on Kafka experience: producers, consumers, topic design, and failure handling.
• AWS in production: ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, SQS/SNS.
• RESTful API and microservices design with PostgreSQL or similar.
• Solid testing discipline: JUnit/Mockito, integration testing (Testcontainers a plus).
• CI/CD, Docker, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CloudFormation).
• Previous contract experience with quick delivery on new builds.
• Hands-on AI-assisted development tools in workflow; Kubernetes and observability tooling.

Responsibilities

• Build event-driven services and integrations on Kafka.
• Deploy and run services on AWS, collaborating with DevOps on infra and pipelines.
• Write clean, tested, production-ready code and set standards via code reviews.
• Work with product and engineering leads to translate requirements into features quickly.

Skills

Java 17+

Spring Boot 3

Kafka

AWS

REST APIs

Microservices

PostgreSQL

JUnit Mockito

Testcontainers

CI/CD

Docker

Terraform

Kubernetes

Observability

AI-assisted coding

Tools

Datadog

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Forward Role is seeking a Senior Java Engineer to join a small team delivering backend services for an existing platform. The role is a 6-month contract, outside IR35, with in-office collaboration 2 days per week in Manchester.

You will build event-driven services on Kafka, deploy to AWS, review code, and work with product and engineering leads to turn requirements into features quickly. Strong Java 17+, Spring Boot, Kafka, AWS and microservices experience are essential.