Senior Backend Engineer

Icehouseventures; Auckland; On-site; NZD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Emerge is a fast-growing NZ fintech seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to own and operate real-time financial services across the platform. You will design and implement Kotlin/Spring Boot services, ensuring correctness and production readiness while collaborating with product and engineering teams.

Ideal candidates have 7+ years of backend experience, strong PostgreSQL skills, and hands-on AWS production experience.

Qualifications

• 7+ years backend engineering experience, with strong Kotlin/Java and Spring Boot depth.
• Production PostgreSQL experience, including schema design, indexing and migrations.
• AWS production experience (ECS, Lambda, S3 or equivalents).
• Experience owning backend services through design, build, release and production support.

Responsibilities

• Design and build Kotlin and Spring services across authorisation, ledger, limits, reconciliation and settlement.
• Extend the core platform for new products across personal, business and partner banking use cases.
• Own correctness through idempotent operations, safe retries, immutable records and reliable event handling.
• Keep PostgreSQL performant and safe through strong schema design, indexing, migrations and query performance.
• Work across AWS infrastructure, observability, alerting and production support for services you own.
• Participate in design reviews, tech reviews, pull request reviews and incident response.
• Use AI coding tools daily, while reviewing, directing and owning the quality of what ships.

Skills

Kotlin/Java

Spring Boot

PostgreSQL

AWS

Backend ownership

Distributed systems

AI coding tools

Payments/Banking domain

NZ work rights

Tools

ECS

Lambda

S3

Job description

About Emerge

Emerge is a fast-growing New Zealand fintech reshaping what modern financial services can look like. Built at the intersection of technology, product, engineering and regulated financial services, the business is creating smart, scalable financial products for people, families and businesses.

The business already has strong foundations in place across transactional accounts, payments and expense management, and is now moving into a wider product suite. That growth creates a rare opportunity for an experienced backend engineer to own high-impact services across real-time financial products and platform growth.

About the role

As Senior Backend Engineer, you will design, build and operate the services that move and account for customer money. You will work across the real-time transaction path, core banking platform and new product capability, with a strong focus on correctness, resilience and production ownership.

This is a hands-on role for someone who can take complex backend work from ambiguity through to production. You will work closely with product and engineering teams, contribute to architecture and technical reviews, and use AI coding tools thoughtfully while owning every line that ships.

You may also support work connected to Emerge’s broader banking-as-a-service and partner delivery priorities, while remaining part of the New Zealand engineering team.

You will:

• Design and build Kotlin and Spring services across authorisation, ledger, limits, reconciliation and settlement.
• Extend the core platform for new products across personal, business and partner banking use cases.
• Own correctness through idempotent operations, safe retries, immutable records and reliable event handling.
• Keep PostgreSQL performant and safe through strong schema design, indexing, migrations and query performance.
• Work across AWS infrastructure, observability, alerting and production support for services you own.
• Participate in design reviews, tech reviews, pull request reviews and incident response.
• Use AI coding tools daily, while reviewing, directing and owning the quality of what ships.

About you

You are a senior backend engineer with strong technical depth and a high sense of ownership. You think carefully about consistency, failure modes, blast radius and trade-offs. You are practical, delivery-focused and comfortable working through complexity without needing heavy structure. You communicate clearly around risk, progress and technical decisions, and you stay close to what you build after it reaches production.

Where you might be right now

You may be a senior backend engineer in a fintech, payments, banking, SaaS, product technology or regulated systems environment. You may also come from a strong backend product engineering background where correctness, reliability and production ownership matter deeply.

You will bring

• Significant backend engineering experience, ideally 7+ years, with strong Kotlin or Java and Spring Boot depth.
• Production experience with PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing, performance and migrations.
• AWS production experience, such as ECS, Lambda, S3 or close equivalents.
• Experience owning backend services through design, build, release and production support.
• Strong judgement around distributed systems, data consistency, safe retries and failure modes.
• Practical AI coding tool experience, with a considered view on review, trust and limits.
• Payments, banking, ledger, reconciliation or regulated financial systems experience would be helpful.
• Current New Zealand work rights, or a clear low-risk pathway to start without lengthy visa delays.

Why join Emerge?

• Own meaningful backend services in a fintech with foundations in place and a clear growth runway ahead.
• Work on real-time financial systems where correctness, reliability and performance matter.
• Join an AI-forward engineering team that values pace, judgement and ownership.
• Partner closely with product, engineering and operations as Emerge expands its platform.
• Make a visible impact as Emerge continues building modern financial products for New Zealand and beyond.