Senior Backend Software Engineer (Java/Spring Boot)

Sanlam; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Sanlam Life and Savings seeks a Senior Backend Software Engineer in Cape Town to build robust, scalable backend services. You will work in a product-aligned engineering squad with product, architecture and platform teams to deliver meaningful outcomes.

The role focuses on reliable, maintainable software, modernising financial services platforms, and collaborating across DevOps and platform teams to ensure production readiness.

Qualifications

• 5+ years’ professional experience building and maintaining enterprise grade backend applications using Java.
• Proven experience as a senior individual contributor within agile delivery teams, contributing to production systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in Java with OO design, data structures and core language constructs.
• Experience with Spring ecosystem: Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Data, Spring Batch.
• Experience building and integrating RESTful APIs for internal and external consumers.
• Hands-on with microservices/miniservices architectures, design patterns, service integration, resilience.
• Experience with automated testing: JUnit, Mockito, unit/integration testing.
• CI/CD experience; build/deployment tooling such as Maven/Gradle, Docker, Kubernetes.
• Version control and collaboration tools: Git, Jira, Confluence.
• Knowledge of relational DBs, ORM (JPA/Hibernate), SQL.

Responsibilities

• Actively participate in agile ceremonies and contribute to continuous improvement of team ways of working.
• Translate product requirements into well-scoped technical work and delivery increments.
• Deliver high-quality software with reliability, maintainability and performance in mind.
• Contribute to solution design and architectural decision-making.
• Write clean, well-tested, well-documented code following best practices.
• Embed quality through unit/integration tests and automated checks in CI/CD pipelines.
• Support deployment, observability and operational readiness across test and production environments.
• Communicate progress, risks and dependencies transparently within the team.
• Share knowledge through code reviews and documentation, mentor peers.
• Continuously improve engineering practices, tools and delivery capabilities.

Skills

Java

Spring Framework

RESTful APIs

Microservices

Unit Testing

CI/CD

Agile/Scrum

Git

Jira

Confluence

SQL

Hibernate

Education

Computer Science degree

Honours or postgraduate degree

Java Certification

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Maven/Gradle

Jira

Confluence

Git

Job description

Sanlam Life and Savings seeks a Senior Backend Software Engineer in Cape Town to build robust, scalable backend services. You will work in a product-aligned engineering squad with product, architecture and platform teams to deliver meaningful outcomes.

The role focuses on reliable, maintainable software, modernising financial services platforms, and collaborating across DevOps and platform teams to ensure production readiness.