Java Technical Team Leader

FNB South Africa; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial institution in Johannesburg is seeking a Java Technical Team Leader to oversee the design and operational excellence of enterprise-grade Java applications. The ideal candidate will have over 10 years of experience in Java and Spring, a strong background in leading technical teams, and a commitment to engineering excellence. This role includes mentoring engineers and ensuring alignment with business goals.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building and operating enterprise-grade Java systems.
• Track record designing enterprise platforms and APIs.
• Proven team leadership skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of technical resources.
• Own the design and delivery of Java applications.
• Align engineering delivery with business goals.

Skills

Java mastery

Spring ecosystem expertise

Microservices & integration

DevOps practices

Leadership and mentoring

Tools

Maven

Docker

Kubernetes

Git

Job description

Overview

Job title : Java Technical Team Leader

Job Location : Gauteng, Johannesburg

Deadline : September 26, 2025

End Date : September 20, 2025

Responsibilities

• To provide expert advice and support in practice formulation and associated best practice improvements
• Responsible for leading and developing a team of technical resources that provide operational project and technical support

Role summary

• Own the design, delivery, and operational excellence of enterprise-grade Java / Spring applications. Set technical vision, lead cross-team initiatives, and ensure our systems are secure, scalable, observable, and easy to evolve.

Key outcomes

• Deliver resilient, performant APIs and event-driven services that meet security, compliance, and scalability standards.
• Help establish and enforce engineering standards : clean architecture, testing, CI / CD, observability.
• Mentor and grow engineers (incl. seniors), lead code / design reviews, and run calibrated technical interviews.
• Align engineering delivery with business goals, own production service health.

Experience & qualifications

• 10+ years building and operating enterprise-grade Java systems at scale.
• Track record designing enterprise platforms, APIs, and microservices ecosystems.
• Demonstrated authority in Java / Spring with design oversight across teams.

Core technical expertise

• Java mastery : Advanced OOP, collections, streams, exceptions, lambdas; deep knowledge of concurrency and memory management, performance tuning, and production troubleshooting.
• Spring ecosystem (expert) : Spring Boot, Spring Security (OAuth2, JWT, CSRF, RBAC), Spring Data JPA, Spring AOP; robust exception handling; profiles / config; modular, reusable components.
• Microservices & integration : Spring Cloud (Config, Eureka, Gateway), service discovery, API gateways, inter-service communication; resilience patterns (retry / timeout / circuit breakers with Resilience4j); REST clients; asynchronous flows with MQ / events; versioned REST APIs with OpenAPI / Swagger.

Data design

• Schema design and evolution, transactional integrity, and JPA query optimization.
• Architecture & patterns : DDD, clean architecture, domain events, proper abstraction / boundaries; secure coding practices.

Testing

• Unit & integration tests with JUnit, Mockito, Testcontainers; high-value test strategy and coverage; CI test gating.

Observability & ops

• End-to-end tracing, metrics, logs; Prometheus / Grafana, ELK (or equivalent); SLOs / error budgets; Post-incident reviews and reliability improvements.
• DevOps & tooling
• CI / CD (advanced) : Bamboo, BitBucket; pipeline design, gated quality checks, Maven automation.
• Containers & orchestration : Docker (images, Dockerfiles, docker-compose); Kubernetes(development focus) (preferred / expected at this level)—deployments, config / secret mgmt, ingress.
• Source control : Strong Git practices—branching strategies, PR workflows, code ownership.
• Monitoring & logging : ELK / EFK, Prometheus, Grafana (or equivalents).

Security & compliance

• Spring Security end-to-end (authn / authz), token management, service-to-service trust.
• Secrets management, perimeter and app-level security, least-privilege access.
• OWASP-aligned secure coding, dependency and image scanning, SAST / DAST integration in CI.

Leadership & collaboration

• Proven team leadership : mentoring, coaching, performance reviews, and hiring / interviewing.
• Deep code / design reviews; owns service health and operational readiness.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management; translates business needs into scalable designs.
• Agile delivery (Scrum / Kanban) : sprint planning, backlog grooming, release management.
• Drives cross-team initiatives, platform migrations and redesign efforts;
• Champions knowledge-sharing (talks / workshops); elevates engineering culture.