#109 - Backend Software Engineer - Payments Platform

Lifted (an Upwork Company); India; On-site; INR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

Lifted (an Upwork Company) is seeking a hands-on Backend Software Engineer to build and maintain payment services in a distributed financial systems environment. You will add new payment capabilities, deliver features and bug fixes, and improve the reliability of production Java and Spring Boot services.

Enterprise experience is strongly preferred. This role aligns with APAC working hours and IST time zone, with a hands-on approach to production-grade systems.

Qualifications

• 5+ years backend Java/Spring Boot production experience.
• Ownership of production services in a distributed system environment.
• GraphQL API experience with DGS or Apollo Java/Kotlin client.
• Hands-on experience with messaging systems (Kafka/SQS/RabbitMQ).
• Strong JPA/Hibernate and Spring Data JPA with MySQL/Aurora; schema migrations.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain production Java and Spring Boot services for a payments platform.
• Add new payment methods and deliver features, bug fixes, and reliability improvements.
• Deliver production-ready changes through GitLab CI, with unit and integration tests meeting JaCoCo quality gates.
• Improve observability and resilience, and support safe canary and production deployments gated by Datadog monitors.

Skills

Java/Spring Boot

Distributed systems

GraphQL (DGS/Apollo)

Kafka/SQS/RabbitMQ

JPA/Hibernate & MySQL

JUnit 5/Mockito

Gradle

GitLab CI/CD & Datadog

Job description

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain production Java and Spring Boot services for a payments platform.
• Add new payment methods and deliver features, bug fixes, and reliability improvements.
• Deliver production-ready changes through GitLab CI , with unit and integration test coverage that meets JaCoCo quality gates .
• Improve observability and resilience, and support safe canary and production deployments gated by Datadog monitors .

Must-Have Skills

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Java and Spring Boot in production microservices.
• Mid-to-senior-level experience with demonstrated ownership of production services in a distributed systems environment.
• Experience building GraphQL APIs with Netflix DGS or consuming APIs through the Apollo Java/Kotlin client . Apollo GraphQL client experience is required.
• Hands-on experience with AWS SQS, Apache Kafka, or RabbitMQ in event-driven distributed systems, including building or maintaining a production Spring Boot service that consumes events.
• Strong JPA/Hibernate and Spring Data JPA experience with MySQL/Aurora, including:
• Transactional design
• Optimistic locking
• Writing JPA entities
• Managing production schema migrations
• Experience writing JUnit 5 unit tests with Mockito and integration tests against live environments.
• Proficiency with Gradle multi-module builds .
• Experience with GitLab CI/CD and Datadog metrics and monitors, including using Datadog monitors as deployment quality gates.
• Responsible use of AI coding assistants, such as GitHub Copilot or Claude , while maintaining code quality and correctness.
• Experience with financial-grade backend systems requiring correctness, idempotency, and consistency.
• Ability to reason clearly about transactional boundaries across external systems, such as a third-party billing platform and a local metadata store.
• Experience designing idempotent event handlers .
• Experience integrating external REST- or SDK-based third-party platforms.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Spring Boot 3 experience.
• Prior billing or payments domain experience.
• DynamoDB with AWS SDK v2 and/or MongoDB with Spring Data in a multi-store architecture.
• Netflix DGS experience.

Required Tools & Platforms

• Java and Spring Boot
• GraphQL and the Apollo Java/Kotlin client
• AWS SQS, Apache Kafka, or RabbitMQ
• JPA/Hibernate, Spring Data JPA, and MySQL/Aurora
• JUnit 5 and Mockito
• Gradle
• GitLab CI/CD
• JaCoCo
• Datadog
• AI coding assistants used responsibly, such as GitHub Copilot or Claude

Location, Time & Engagement

• Candidates must be based in an eligible APAC location .
• Working-hour coverage aligned with India Standard Time (IST) is required.

We are seeking a hands‑on Backend Software Engineer to build and maintain payment services in a distributed financial systems environment. You will add new payment capabilities, deliver features and bug fixes, and improve the reliability of production Java and Spring Boot services. Enterprise experience is strongly preferred.