Senior Java Team Lead - Hands-on Microservices Architect

Bullock Tech Talent Partners; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,700,000; Full time

Job summary

Bullock Tech Talent Partners is partnering with an international 5G engineering and design business to hire a Cape Town-based Senior Java Team Lead. You will lead a hands-on team delivering high-volume, low-latency Java services with a strong Spring Boot stack.

You'll own delivery for your team's slice of the platform, including planning, code quality, tech direction, and stakeholder communication, while staying hands-on to ship production code weekly.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building production Java systems with at least 2 years leading a team of engineers.
• Strong Spring Boot and modern Java (17+); able to architect a service from scratch.
• Real microservices experience: service boundaries, async messaging, API design, versioning, observability.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team (about 30%): break down projects, allocate work, track delivery and run sprint ceremonies.
• Stay hands-on (about 70%): design and build services on Java 17+ / Spring Boot; write production code weekly.
• Own code review standards; ensure timely, high-quality reviews and alignment with product goals.
• Drive architecture decisions, design reviews, and trade-offs; mentor engineers and contribute to hiring decisions.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Microservices

PostgreSQL

MySQL

AWS

Docker

CI/CD

Linux

Git

Agile/Scrum

Claude AI tools

Education

BSc / Diploma in Computer Science

Oracle Certified Professional (Java)

Tools

Terraform

Kafka

RabbitMQ

SQS

Kotlin

Go

Claude AI tooling

Nginx

ECS/EKS

Job description

Bullock Tech Talent Partners is partnering with an international 5G engineering and design business to hire a Cape Town-based Senior Java Team Lead. You will lead a hands-on team delivering high-volume, low-latency Java services with a strong Spring Boot stack.

You'll own delivery for your team's slice of the platform, including planning, code quality, tech direction, and stakeholder communication, while staying hands-on to ship production code weekly.