Backend Engineering Team Lead (Java / Cloud-Native Platform)

About Us: Banank – a fresh chapter in banking technology! 🍌 We combine generational wisdom with cutting-edge tech to create a top-notch banking experience for digital natives. Role Overview Banank is seeking an experienced Backend Engineering Team Lead to lead the engineering team responsible for designing, developing, and evolving the backend services powering our digital banking platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role combining advanced backend engineering, architectural ownership, team development, and end-to-end delivery responsibility. You will lead and mentor a team of backend engineers while remaining actively involved in designing and implementing complex, business critical functionality using Java, Quarkus, and modern cloud-native technologies. Our backend platform is built around microservices, event-driven architecture, and distributed systems, with a strong emphasis on performance, reliability, security, and scalability. You will work closely with Product Owners, Systems Analysts, Solution Architects, Data Engineers, QA, Security, and Platform teams to translate business, design, and technical requirements into reliable production ready solutions. We are looking for a technical leader who takes ownership, makes pragmatic architectural decisions, challenges unnecessary complexity, and proactively improves engineering practices and delivery efficiency. Key Responsibilities Backend Engineering & Architecture - Lead the architecture, design, development, and technical evolution of Banank's backend services and platform components. - Remain actively involved in hands-on development of complex and business-critical functionality using Java and Quarkus. - Design scalable, secure, maintainable, and high-performance microservices supporting financial operations. - Define and maintain backend engineering standards, architectural principles, reusable components, and coding practices. - Apply pragmatic engineering principles, keeping solutions simple, practical, and easy to understand and maintain, avoiding unnecessary complexity and overengineering. - Evaluate architectural alternatives and make informed technical decisions based on performance, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability. - Contribute to technical design discussions and architecture reviews Event-Driven Architecture & System Integration - Design and implement reliable event-driven applications and asynchronous communication patterns. - Build and maintain integrations using NATS and related messaging and event-streaming technologies. - Ensure correct implementation of message delivery, idempotency, retries, ordering, error handling, and fault tolerance. - Design and maintain APIs and service integrations using RESTful APIs, gRPC, and WebSockets. - Define and maintain API contracts, event schemas, and data exchange formats, including Protocol Buffers, Apache Avro, and JSON. - Collaborate with other engineering teams to ensure consistent integration patterns across backend services, data platforms, and external systems. Banking Platform & Financial Integrations - Design and implement backend services supporting banking products, customer accounts, payments, transactions, fees, and related financial operations. - Integrate backend services with core banking systems, payment providers, card processing platforms, and other external financial services. - Ensure transactional correctness, data integrity, consistency, and auditability across distributed financial workflows. - Implement business and regulatory requirements as integral parts of application functionality, including KYC, AML, transaction monitoring, and audit trails. - Collaborate with Compliance, Risk, and Security teams to ensure solutions meet applicable financial and regulatory requirements. - Support reliable integration with Banank's real-time data platform for operational data consumption and decision-making. Data Management & Persistence - Design efficient and reliable data access patterns for distributed backend applications. - Work with relational and NoSQL databases, key-value stores, and object storage solutions. - Ensure appropriate handling of transactions, concurrency, consistency, and data integrity. - Design persistence and caching strategies based on application requirements and performance characteristics. - Collaborate with Data Engineering teams on data contracts, schemas, event structures, and real-time information exchange. Cloud Native Development & Platform Integration - Design and develop cloud native backend applications suitable for containerized environments. - Ensure applications are compatible with Kubernetes based deployment and orchestration. - Optimize services for performance, scalability, resource efficiency, and operational resilience. - Collaborate with DevSecOps teams on deployment architecture, configuration management, secrets handling, and infrastructure requirements. - Contribute to application deployment and operational practices within GCP environments. Quality, Testing & Engineering Excellence - Establish and maintain high standards for code quality, maintainability, and testability. - Promote automated testing as integral parts of the development process. - Conduct periodic code reviews and provide constructive technical feedback. - Ensure appropriate test coverage for business critical and security sensitive functionality. - Identify and address technical debt, architectural weaknesses, and recurring defects. - Promote consistent engineering practices across the backend development team. Observability, Reliability & Production Operations - Ensure backend services are designed for production observability and operational reliability. - Implement and maintain metrics and structured logging. - Collaborate with Data and DevSecOps teams on observability. - Define appropriate service level indicators and contribute to performance and reliability objectives. - Investigate complex issues, performance bottlenecks, and service failures. - Participate in incident response and root cause analysis. - Proactively improve service availability, fault tolerance, and recoverability. Security & Compliance - Promote secure by design development practices across backend services. - Ensure appropriate implementation of authentication, authorization, access controls, and protection of sensitive financial information. - Collaborate with Platform teams on API security, identity management, and secure service to service communication. - Support integration with enterprise API management and identity solutions. - Ensure application designs support auditability, traceability, and applicable regulatory requirements. - Contribute to security reviews, vulnerability remediation, and continuous improvement of application security. Team Leadership & Mentorship - Lead, mentor, and develop a team of backend engineers, promoting technical excellence, ownership, and collaboration. - Set technical priorities, coordinate engineering activities, and ensure effective allocation of development efforts. - Provide technical guidance through architecture discussions, code reviews and complex problem-solving. - Support engineers professional development through regular feedback, knowledge sharing, and mentoring. - Foster a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, constructive communication, and high engineering standards. - Maintain an appropriate balance between hands-on development and team leadership responsibilities. Engineering Delivery & Cross-Team Collaboration - Take ownership of backend engineering delivery within the team's assigned domains. - Work closely with Product Owners and Systems Analysts to clarify requirements, identify dependencies, and define implementation approaches. - Translate business, design, and technical requirements into actionable engineering tasks. - Lead technical planning, task decomposition, estimation, and prioritization. - Participate in Agile delivery processes, including Scrum, Kanban, as appropriate. - Identify and proactively escalate delivery risks, technical blockers, and cross-team dependencies. - Collaborate with Data Engineering, Mobile Development, QA, Security, and DevSecOps teams to ensure consistent end-to-end functionality. - Use Jira, Confluence, and related collaboration tools to support transparent planning, documentation, and delivery tracking. - Ensure engineering commitments are realistic and delivery quality is not compromised by unnecessary shortcuts. Continuous Improvement & Technical Initiative - Proactively identify opportunities to improve backend architecture, development speed, system performance, and maintainability. - Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and development approaches through practical PoCs. - Promote automation, reusable components, and engineering practices that reduce repetitive work. - Continuously improve development workflows, testing strategies, CI/CD integration, and operational efficiency. - Encourage technical curiosity, constructive challenges to existing approaches, and evidence based engineering decisions. Requirements Core Requirements - 7+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, with strong hands-on expertise in Java. - 3+ years of experience leading or managing software engineering teams, including technical leadership, mentoring, prioritization, and delivery ownership. - Deep practical experience with Quarkus, including designing and developing production grade backend services. - Strong understanding of GraalVM, including its application to Java workloads, performance optimization, and native executable development. - Proven experience designing, building, and operating complex cloud-native enterprise software solutions. - Strong understanding of modern backend architecture, microservices, distributed systems, and software engineering principles. - Solid experience developing transactional systems where correctness, consistency, and data integrity are critical, such as banking, payments, wallets, billing, or financial platforms. - Strong experience with event-driven architectures and messaging technologies such as NATS or similar platforms. - Good understanding of asynchronous processing, idempotency, retries, message delivery guarantees, and distributed system failure scenarios. - Strong experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs, gRPC services, and WebSocket connections. - Experience with data serialization formats such as Protocol Buffers, and Apache Avro. - Strong experience with relational databases, including transaction management, query optimization, and data modelling. - Experience with NoSQL databases, key-value stores, and object storage solutions. - Good understanding of Kubernetes, containerized environments, and cloud-native application deployment. - Strong knowledge of automated testing practices, including unit, integration, and contract testing. - Experience with CI/CD processes, automated builds, testing, and deployment pipelines. - Understanding of production observability, including metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerting. - Strong understanding of application security, authentication, authorization, and secure API development. - Experience conducting architecture reviews, technical design discussions, and code reviews. - Strong knowledge of software development lifecycle processes and Agile delivery approaches, including Scrum and Kanban. - Experience using Jira, Confluence, and related collaboration and documentation tools. - Proven ability to manage engineering priorities, technical dependencies, and delivery commitments while remaining actively involved in development. - Strong analytical thinking, problem-solving, troubleshooting, and technical decision-making skills. - Excellent written and spoken English. - Ability to work effectively in a fully remote, internationally distributed engineering team. Nice to Have - Experience developing backend services for banking, FinTech, payments, or other regulated financial environments. - Familiarity with NATS and persistent event-stream processing. - Experience with distributed SQL databases and high availability data architectures. - Familiarity with modern observability stacks. - Experience with GitOps and deployment automation technologies. - Understanding of financial messaging standards, including ISO 20022. - Knowledge of regulatory and security requirements relevant to financial services, like DORA, GDPR, and PCI DSS. - Experience with performance engineering, load testing, and optimization of high-throughput transactional applications. - Experience with technical hiring, onboarding, and developing engineering teams. - Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience. Why Banank? - Lead the backend engineering team building a ultra modern digital banking platform from the ground up. - Combine hands-on software development with meaningful technical leadership and architectural ownership. - Work with modern technologies including Java, Quarkus, GraalVM, NATS, Kubernetes, and cloud-native infrastructure. - Influence backend architecture, engineering standards, and technical decisions across the platform. - Build mission critical financial services where performance, reliability, security, and data integrity matter. - Collaborate with experienced engineers across Mobile, Data, Platform, Security, and Product teams. - Enjoy a fully remote environment with significant technical ownership and autonomy. - Join a growing FinTech organization with opportunities for professional development and technical impact. Join the Banank Family! Send us your resume in English, and let’s shape the next generation of fintech together!