Java Developer (Mid to Senior)

Industry: Banking and financial services · Level: Mid to Senior · Experience: Mid 4–6 years, Senior 7+ years

Employment type: Fixed-term contract of at least 12 months, with a strong possibility of extension or conversion to permanent · Rate: Competitive hourly rate

Summary

Our client, a leading financial services institution, is looking for a Java Developer to design, build and maintain secure, high-volume transaction systems behind core banking, payments and digital channels. You will work in agile squads, turn business requirements into resilient microservices, and uphold quality, security and regulatory standards.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or National Diploma (NQF level 6+) in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering or a related field

• 4+ years of commercial Java development for mid-level; 7+ years for senior

• Proven delivery in a bank, insurer or other regulated financial institution

Certifications

• Oracle Certified Professional: Java SE 11 or 17 Developer (advantageous)

• Spring Professional Certification (advantageous)

• AWS Certified Developer – Associate or Microsoft AZ-204 (advantageous)

• Scrum or SAFe certification, e.g. PSM I, SAFe Practitioner (advantageous)

• Secure coding certification such as CSSLP (advantageous for senior)

Duties

• Design, develop, test and deploy Java and Spring Boot microservices and APIs for banking platforms

• Build and maintain integrations with core banking, payment switches, card systems and third-party providers

• Write clean, well-tested, secure code and take part in peer code reviews

• Optimise application performance, throughput and resilience for high-volume, low-latency transactions

• Analyse and resolve production incidents, performing root-cause analysis and permanent fixes

• Translate business and regulatory requirements into technical designs and documentation

• Maintain CI/CD pipelines with DevOps and QA teams to enable frequent, reliable releases

• Apply secure coding practices and meet audit, change-management and compliance requirements

• Senior level: lead technical design, mentor developers, set coding standards and guide architecture decisions

Requirements

Technical skills

• Java 8/11/17+, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Security, Hibernate/JPA

• RESTful and SOAP web services, API design and API gateways

• Messaging and streaming: Kafka, IBM MQ or RabbitMQ

• Relational databases (Oracle, SQL Server or PostgreSQL), SQL tuning and transaction management

• Microservices architecture, Docker, Kubernetes or OpenShift

• Git, Maven or Gradle, Jenkins or Azure DevOps, SonarQube

• Unit and integration testing with JUnit, Mockito and TestContainers

• Security standards: OAuth2, OpenID Connect, JWT, TLS, OWASP Top 10

Financial services knowledge

• Core banking, payments, cards, lending or treasury platforms

• Standards such as ISO 20022, ISO 8583 or SWIFT (advantageous)

• Regulatory awareness: POPIA, FICA, PCI DSS and audit-trail requirements

Personal attributes

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with close attention to detail

• Clear communicator who works well with business analysts, testers and stakeholders

• Comfortable in agile, regulated environments with strict change control

Skills

Java, Java 8, Java 11, Java 17, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Security, Hibernate, JPA, Microservices, REST APIs, SOAP, Kafka, IBM MQ, RabbitMQ, SQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Git, Maven, Gradle, Jenkins, SonarQube, JUnit, Mockito, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, JWT, OWASP, CI/CD, Agile, Banking, Payments, ISO 20022, ISO 8583, SWIFT, POPIA, PCI DSS