Senior Full Stack Developer (Java & Platform Engineering)

Momentum; Centurion; On-site; ZAR 700 000 - 900 000; Full time

Job summary

A leading South African financial services firm is seeking an experienced Senior Specialist to lead the design and development of microservices on AWS EKS using Java 21 and Spring Boot. This role involves making critical engineering decisions to ensure the quality and reliability of applications. Ideal candidates will have over 10 years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on microservices and platform engineering. The position offers a dynamic work environment focused on technical leadership and innovation.

Qualifications

• 10 years of professional software engineering experience.
• 5 years leading microservice design and delivery on Spring Boot in production.
• 5 years of hands-on platform engineering with Docker/Kubernetes and AWS EKS.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, develop microservices and platform capabilities on AWS EKS.
• Drive incident resolution and architectural improvements.
• Define and verify non-functional requirements and implement automation.

Skills

Java 21

Spring Boot

AWS EKS

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Education

Relevant IT degree/diploma

Tools

AWS

GitLab

Job description

Momentum Group Limited is a significant player in South Africa's life insurance and integrated financial services sectors. We are a Level 1 B‑B‑BEE South African‑based group dedicated to building and protecting our clients' financial dreams. Our client‑facing retail and specialist brands, including Momentum, Metropolitan, Guardrisk, and Eris Properties, play a pivotal role in fulfilling this purpose.

Our federated model emphasises empowerment, accountability, and continuous engagement with all our stakeholders. Designed in close consultation with leaders across the group, this operating model aims to unleash each business unit's inherent energy and commercial drive through our collaborative federated approach. Visit us at www.momentumgroupltd.co.za.

Disclaimer: As an applicant, please verify the legitimacy of this job advert on our company career page.

Role Purpose

Lead the design, development, deployment, and operation of microservices and platform capabilities on AWS EKS using Java 21 and Spring Boot. Own critical engineering decisions across application and platform layers (runtime, CI/CD, observability, security), and ensure delivery quality, performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.

Requirements

• 10 years professional software engineering experience, with 5 years leading microservice design and delivery on Spring Boot in production.
• 5 years hands‑on platform engineering with Docker/Kubernetes and AWS EKS (cluster operations, upgrades, autoscaling, ingress, observability).
• Proven ownership of mission‑critical systems (high availability, disaster recovery, performance engineering).
• Demonstrable experience in CI/CD, automated testing (unit/integration/contract), and secure coding practices.
• Relevant IT degree/diploma; advanced certifications advantageous (e.g., AWS Certified Developer/DevOps Engineer, Kubernetes certifications).
• Strong grounding in computer science fundamentals (algorithms, data structures, distributed systems).

Duties & Responsibilities

• Architecture & Design: Contribute to the definition and evolution of microservice and API architectures (domain boundaries, reliability patterns, security controls) using Java 21, Spring Framework/Spring Boot, Tomcat (embedded), and REST; apply concurrency/performance features where appropriate.
• Platform Engineering: Design, implement, and operate container platforms (Docker, Kubernetes) on AWS EKS—including cluster provisioning, node pools, autoscaling, upgrade strategies, ingress, service mesh (if applicable), multi‑environment topology, as well as networking, VPC, and subnet setups within the AWS tenant.
• Platform Engineering: Establish Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform/CloudFormation), Gitlab pipelines (e.g., Argo CD/Flux), and golden path templates for services.
• Cloud Engineering: Engineer solutions on AWS (e.g., EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC, ECR, CloudWatch) with secure‑by‑default patterns (network segmentation, least privilege, secrets management).
• Delivery Excellence: Own CI/CD for services and platforms (build, test, security scanning, artifact management, progressive delivery/blue‑green/canary).
• Quality & Non‑Functionals: Define and verify NFRs (performance, scalability, resiliency, security) and implement automation (contract tests, integration tests, performance tests).
• Reliability & Operations: Lead complex incident resolution and drive permanent fixes through architectural improvements.
• Documentation: Produce technical specifications and operational playbooks; ensure traceability from requirements to deployed solutions.
• Governance & Compliance: Ensure adherence to secure coding standards (e.g., OWASP), data protection (e.g., POPIA), architecture guardrails, and risk controls.

Client Services

• Engage with product owners, business stakeholders, and operations to translate requirements into robust solutions and set clear expectations on timelines, risks, and trade‑offs.
• Uphold service levels and proactively identify opportunities to improve customer outcomes through reliability, performance, and usability.

People

• Technical Leadership: Mentor and coach engineers; lead peer reviews; set coding standards and best practices across teams.
• Knowledge Sharing: Facilitate design sessions, guilds/CoPs, and enablement on platform tooling and patterns.
• Change Leadership: Positively influence platform adoption, modernisation initiatives, and engineering culture.

Finance

• Cost Management (FinOps): Track and optimise cloud and platform costs (compute/storage/network), propose savings plans/reserved instances where appropriate, and design with cost observability.
• Recommend efficiencies through automation, reuse, and standardisation.

Decision‑Making Authority & Scope (Senior Specialist)

• Own technical strategy and reference architectures for microservices and platform capabilities within a product domain.
• Approve service designs and deployment patterns; gatekeep production changes through engineering standards and readiness checklists.
• Make high‑impact decisions in incident scenarios; balance reliability, security, and cost within agreed risk appetite.
• Influence vendor/tool selection and cross‑team priorities in collaboration with Architecture, Security, and Operations.

Competencies

• Systems thinking; strategic problem solving; data‑driven decision making.
• Clear technical communication—able to articulate trade‑offs to technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Collaboration and stakeholder management across Product, Architecture, Security, Ops, and Business.
• Ownership, resilience, and continuous improvement mindset.

Technical Skills (Required)

• Languages/Runtime: Java 21, modern Java features, JVM performance tuning.
• Frameworks: Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Data/JPA, Spring Security.
• Runtime & Servers: Tomcat (embedded via Spring Boot), understanding of JVM container best practices.
• Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm; service discovery, configuration, and secrets management.
• Cloud (AWS): EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC, ECR, CloudWatch; networking (VPC, NACLs/Security Groups), load balancing, scaling.
• Microservice Patterns: RESTful APIs, asynchronous messaging, idempotency, circuit breaking, retries/timeouts, distributed tracing.
• Platform Engineering: Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation), GitOps (e.g., Argo CD/Flux).
• CI/CD: Pipeline design, artifact/versioning, progressive delivery (blue‑green/canary), security scanning (SCA/SAST/DAST).
• Security & Compliance: OWASP Top 10, secrets management, encryption in transit/at rest, least‑privilege access, auditability (POPIA considerations).
• Data: RDBMS (e.g., Postgres/MySQL/Oracle), schema design, migrations; performance diagnostics.
• Front‑End (full‑stack exposure): Solid web UI engineering principles, component‑based UI and API integration (Angular), accessibility, and performance optimisation.