About this role
About the role
You will support and build Watu, a leading asset financier focused on mobility and connectivity. Watu provides financing for motorcycles, three-wheelers and smartphones across multiple markets, through systems built for scale, reliability and long-term use.
What you'll do
-
Design, build, and run Java/Spring Boot services in production, from API contract to monitoring.
-
Make architecture decisions and document them in ADRs so the reasoning outlives the conversation.
-
Build reliable event-driven flows on Kafka or RabbitMQ, designing for retries, duplicates, and partial failure.
-
Integrate with partners and financial institutions, including legacy SOAP/XML services.
-
Review pull requests for design, maintainability, performance, and test coverage, not just style.
-
Own the documentation for what you build: READMEs, runbooks, API specs.
-
Mentor other engineers and take technical lead on projects.
-
Full-stack track: build and maintain Angular front-end features end to end.
-
What you need
-
5+ years of professional Java, including at least 3 years making design decisions on production systems.
-
Deep Spring Boot experience: dependency injection, Spring Security, Spring Data, transaction management, and testing.
-
Solid REST API design: versioning, error handling, idempotency, pagination, and OpenAPI documentation.
-
Strong relational database skills (PostgreSQL or MySQL): schema design, indexing, query optimization, and JPA/Hibernate, including knowing when to bypass the ORM.
-
Production experience with Kafka or RabbitMQ: consumer groups, offset management, delivery semantics, and idempotent consumers.
-
A practical grasp of distributed-system failure modes: eventual consistency, retries, circuit breakers, timeouts, and distributed tracing.
-
Testing discipline: unit tests with JUnit and Mockito, integration tests against a real database, and a sense of what belongs at each level of the test pyramid.
-
Comfort with Docker, CI/CD pipelines (we use Maven, Jenkins, and Git with mandatory PR review), and AWS.
-
Security awareness: OWASP Top 10 and proper secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager, Vault, or similar).
-
Regular use of AI coding tools for code generation, tests, debugging, and documentation, along with the judgment to verify what they produce.
-
Professional working English.
-
Nice to have
-
Fintech or payments experience, especially reconciliation, payment idempotency, and audit logging.
-
Kotlin, or an interest in learning it.
-
Avro or Protocol Buffers with a schema registry.
-
WebSockets, Nginx, HAProxy, Tomcat.
-
Report generation with JasperReports or xdocreport.
-
Experience formally leading a team.
-
Full-stack track: additionally
-
2+ years with Angular and TypeScript, including RxJS, HTML, and SCSS (Bootstrap is a plus).
-
Familiarity with front-end build tooling (Webpack, Babel).
-
Bonus: AngularJS experience (we maintain some legacy code), React, or Vue.
-
How we work
-
We clarify ambiguous requirements early instead of building the wrong thing well.
-
We value "I'm not sure, let me check" over confident guesses.
-
We treat code review as a design conversation.
-
We write things down.
What we offer
Compensation range within market standards, contract type (CLT/PJ), benefits, global growth path