Senior Java Engineer: 6 month contract. Outside IR35, 2 days a week in Manchester.

I'm looking for a senior Java Engineer to join a small team working on building a load of new backend services for an existing platform. The role requires someone who can be in office a couple of days a week to collaborate with the small engineering and product team.

What you’ll be doing

• Building event-driven services and integrations on Kafka
• Deploying and running services on AWS, working closely with DevOps on infrastructure and pipelines
• Writing clean, tested, production-ready code, and setting the standard through code review
• Working directly with product and engineering leads to turn requirements into working features fast

Required experience:

• Strong commercial experience in Java (17+) and Spring Boot, ideally Spring Boot 3
• Hands-on Kafka experience: producers, consumers, topic design, and handling failure and replay
• AWS in production, e.g. ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, SQS/SNS
• RESTful API and microservices design, plus relational databases (PostgreSQL or similar)
• Solid testing discipline: JUnit, Mockito, integration testing (Testcontainers a plus)
• CI/CD, Docker, and comfort with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CloudFormation)
• Previous contract experience, landing quickly and delivering on a new build

• Hands-on use of AI-assisted development in your daily workflow, such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor or ChatGPT, for scaffolding, refactoring, test generation and reviewing generated code critically
• Kubernetes, observability tooling (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)

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