Senior Software Engineer (Staff)(RDPT)

PowerToFly; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial technology firm in Greater London is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to contribute to building a real-time data platform. You will design and maintain critical streaming infrastructure using Java and Kafka. The ideal candidate has a strong background in event-driven architecture, cloud technologies, and cross-functional team collaboration. This hybrid role offers opportunities to work with cutting-edge technologies and drive improvements in code quality and deployment practices.

Benefits

Ownership of critical components

Opportunity to innovate

Strong organizational support

Qualifications

• Experience in Java or Python Backend or Data Development.
• Strong understanding of event‑driven architectures.
• Experience with Kafka, Flink, and distributed streaming systems.
• Ability to communicate with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Proven delivery of scalable, fault‑tolerant solutions.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain streaming infrastructure and services using Kafka and Flink.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver solutions.
• Champion event‑driven architectures across the organization.
• Contribute to code quality through testing and best practices.

Skills

Java

Python

Kafka

Flink

Docker

Agile methodologies

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Kubernetes

JUnit

Cucumber

Job description

Job Description

Currencycloud was acquired by Visa in December 2021. Our Realtime Data Platform Team is a newly formed group focused on enabling and supporting real‑time data capabilities across the organisation. This team provides foundational services such as Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Apache Flink, and other streaming technologies that power real‑time applications and data flows.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll be a key contributor to building and maintaining these platform services. You will work on designing and implementing solutions that ensure reliability, scalability, and ease of use for other engineering teams. This is a hands‑on role where you’ll collaborate closely with peers, contribute to technical decisions, and help shape best practices for real‑time data systems.

Our stack runs on AWS as a set of distributed applications using Kubernetes and a microservice‑led architecture. We are also utilising Kafka for our streaming and PACT for Contract testing.

What you’ll get to do:

• Design, develop, and maintain streaming infrastructure and services using Kafka, Flink, and related technologies.
• Build tools and frameworks that make it easy for other teams to consume real‑time data capabilities.
• Ensure high availability, scalability, and observability of platform components.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to understand requirements and deliver solutions that meet organisational needs.
• Contribute to continuous improvement in code quality, testing, and deployment practices.
• Act as an evangelist for event‑driven architectures – implement them, communicate their benefits, and champion adoption across the organisation.

You’ll get:

• Ownership of critical components within the real‑time data platform.
• Opportunity to work with cutting‑edge streaming technologies.
• A modern tech stack and autonomy to innovate.
• Strong organisational support and visibility for your work.

Our Tech Stack includes:

• Object‑oriented programming forms the bulk of our codebase, currently in Java 11+, and ideally Spring Boot.
• Highly‑scalable, highly‑available, cloud‑native applications on AWS are key to our next phase of growth, written to 12‑factor principles and fit into our microservices architecture.
• Cloud‑related tools, services, and distributed system observability to support these applications, such as Docker, Kubernetes, ElasticSearch, log management systems, and Datadog APM.
• API specifications, conforming to the OpenAPI (Swagger) standard, provide a clean boundary both externally between our customers and our product, and internally between our microservices.
• SQL, and large SQL databases, provide the persistence layer for our applications. You’ll be working with (and know the limitations of using) such large datastores.
• Infrastructure automation is primarily owned by the infrastructure team, but you will be a consumer of their work; familiarity with AWS, Terraform and Docker is beneficial.
• Testing approaches, including TDD, BDD and Contract Testing, all form an important part of our approach to quality assurance, ensuring that the code that we write forms products that are fit for use. We currently use a variety of frameworks including JUnit, RSpec and Cucumber.
• Agile development, with teams broadly aligned with the Spotify – Squads and Tribes – model, helps us deliver incremental improvements to our products in an iterative manner. Advocating this model, and joining us on a journey of continuous improvement, is a key attribute of members of our teams.
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines allow us to automate‑all‑the‑things, providing repeatable builds and consistent deployments.
• GitHub, and the GitHub PR review process, forms a core part of our developer workflow, and peer reviews help share knowledge and improve quality.
• Teamwork, and cross‑team collaboration, is fundamental to the delivery of our applications. Whilst each application has an independent path to production, there will always be some activities and initiatives that span multiple teams and require cross‑team collaboration. Within your team you’ll need to collaborate with a number of stakeholders, including Product Owners and QA, as part of your product development.

This is a hybrid position. Expectation of days in office will be confirmed by your hiring manager.

Qualifications:

Preferred Qualifications:
Experienced in Java or Python Backend or Data Development.
Passion for event‑driven architectures and ability to advocate for them across teams.
Strong experience with Kafka, Flink, and distributed streaming systems.
Skills with functional Java (versions 8+) and Spring (ideally Spring Boot).
Agile ways of working such as Scrum or Kanban in cross‑functional teams.
Expert knowledge of Docker, EKS, AWS (public cloud) and Kafka.
Ability to communicate equally effectively with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
Modern Cloud‑Native architectures and practices. To name some: high‑availability, high‑scalability, microservices, 12‑factor apps, CI/CD, heavy testing automation and observability.
TDD, BDD and Contract testing.
Working in a DevOps environment, or passion and willingness to work in this way.
Proven delivery of well‑tested, scalable, fault‑tolerant and performant solutions.
A pragmatic approach to solutions and delivery of technical projects.
A self‑starter who takes accountability for getting things done.
Pragmatism in decision making and ability to get buy‑in for ideas and getting them done.
Exceptional structure and attention to detail.
Comfortable challenging the status quo and always curious about the way things work.
Great written and verbal communication skills.
Comfortable working in a scale‑up or growth environment and as part of a wider team.

Additional Information

Visa is an EEO Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.