Senior Software Engineer

TEKsystems; Sheffield; On-site; GBP 101,000 - 111,000; Full time

Job summary

TEKsystems is seeking an exceptional Senior Java Software Engineering Consultant in Sheffield to join our engineering community at the intersection of modern software delivery and applied AI.

You will design, build, and ship production-grade Java/Spring Boot microservices, implement prompt-driven LLM workflows, and lead DevOps practices across CI/CD, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms. This contract role blends software engineering with AI integration.

Qualifications

• Extensive Java/Spring Boot microservices experience.
• Hands-on AI/LLM integration in enterprise apps.
• Cloud and DevOps familiarity (Kubernetes, CI/CD).
• Strong SQL and in-memory DBs (PostgreSQL, Redis).
• Experience with Kafka or similar streaming.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship Java/Spring Boot microservices and APIs.
• Develop DecOps pipelines and improve CI/CD observability.
• Design prompts, manage prompt libraries, and enable structured outputs.
• Architect agentic AI systems with memory and tool-use workflows.
• Ensure LLM observability, logging, tracing, and guardrails.

Skills

Java / Spring Boot

React

PostgreSQL

Redis

Kafka

AI / LLM integration

Prompt engineering

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Terraform

Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Job description

We are seeking an exceptional Java Software Engineering Consultant to join our engineering community at the intersection of modern software delivery and applied AI - building and shipping software. The successful candidate will have deep expertise in Java/Spring Boot microservices development, combined with deep hands-on expertise with large language models driving agentic flows, whether via prompt engineering or otherwise.

The key responsibilities will cover

Software Engineering & Delivery:

• Design, build, and ship production-quality Java/Spring Boot microservices and APIs within our current business controls.
• Build and Optimise DecOps pipelines - enhancing CI/CD processing, including testing and platform/process observability
• Design, iterate, and optimise prompts for a wide range of LLM use cases — instruction following, structured output generation, classification, summarisation, code generation, and reasoning tasks
• Build and manage prompt libraries and versioning strategies, treating prompts as first-class engineering artefacts
• Collaborate with product and domain teams to translate business requirements into precise, well-structured prompt specifications

Agentic AI & LLM Integration:

• Architect and implement /maintain agentic systems — autonomous agents, multi-agent pipelines, tool-use workflows, planning loops, and memory augmented reasoning
• Implement LLM observability — logging, tracing, evaluation pipelines, and guardrails — to maintain quality and reliability in production AI systems
• Advise on responsible AI deployment, including output validation, human-in-the-loop design, and risk mitigation for agentic workflows

Technical Skills & Experience Required

Full-Stack Engineering:

• Strong proficiency in Java / Spring Boot — REST APIs, event-driven services, security, and performance optimisation
• Solid React development skills and API integration
• Experience with relational and in-memory databases (PostgreSQL, Redis)
• Messaging and streaming platforms — Kafka, or equivalent
• Experience building and integrating AI/LLM solutions into Java-based enterprise applications

Prompt Engineering:

• Demonstrable, hands-on Experience engineering prompts for production LLM applications — not just prototypes
• Familiarity with prompt evaluation frameworks and tooling (PromptFlow, LangSmith, Braintrust, or custom eval pipelines)
• Understanding of tokenisation, context limits, temperature tuning, and model-specific behaviours across major LLM providers
• Experience structuring prompts for tool/function calling, structured JSON output, and multi-turn conversations

DevOps & Infrastructure:

• Kubernetes — deployments, services, ingress, Helm, Kustomize, HPA, and RBAC
• CI/CD pipelines — GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or equivalent
• Infrastructure as code — Terraform
• Cloud platforms — AWS, GCP, or Azure

Job Title: Senior Software Engineer
Location: Sheffield, UK
Rate/Salary: 550.00 - 600.00 GBP Daily
Job Type: Contract