Senior Software Engineer (backend - Java) At Quidax
full-time
About the Role
As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll design, build, and operate backend services that power critical parts of the Quidax platform.
Beyond implementation, you'll help shape technical direction, mentor engineers, improve engineering practices, and contribute to building a world-class engineering culture.
We're looking for someone who can balance speed with quality, make sound engineering trade-offs, and take ownership of services from design through production.
What You'll Be Owning
Build & Scale Core Platform Services:
Within your first 90 days:
Deliver production-ready backend features independently.
Become a trusted owner of one or more backend services.
Contribute meaningfully to architecture and design discussions.
Improve service reliability, observability, or performance in at least one area of the platform.
Within your first 6 months:
Lead the design and implementation of complex backend systems.
Drive improvements to engineering quality, maintainability, and developer experience.
Help establish patterns and best practices for building scalable services.
Mentor engineers through code reviews, technical discussions, and design collaboration.
Drive Reliability & Operational Excellence:
Own services throughout their lifecycle, from design and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and production support.
Improve system reliability, observability, security, and performance.
Investigate production incidents and drive long-term fixes rather than temporary workarounds.
Continuously identify opportunities to simplify systems and reduce technical debt.
Contribute to Technical Direction:
Participate in architecture reviews and technical decision-making.
Help shape how we design APIs, distributed systems, and internal platform services.
Contribute to technical documentation, RFCs, and engineering standards.
Make thoughtful engineering trade-offs between speed, complexity, scalability, and maintainability.
Build a Strong Engineering Culture
Review code and provide actionable feedback.
Advocate for testing, operational excellence, and engineering best practices.
Collaborate effectively across Product, Design, Compliance, Risk, and Engineering.
Raise the bar for ownership, quality, and technical excellence.
Biggest Challenges You'll Tackle
Here's what will keep you up at night, in the best possible way:
Designing systems that handle high transaction volumes without sacrificing reliability.
Building services that remain secure, available, and observable in a fast-moving financial environment.
Balancing engineering speed with the quality standards expected of financial infrastructure.
Simplifying increasingly complex systems as the platform grows.
Debugging and solving difficult production issues where the answer isn't obvious.
Scaling architecture, processes, and engineering practices alongside rapid business growth.
What We're Looking For
We're less interested in someone who simply knows Java and more interested in someone who has built and operated real production systems.
You'll likely be a strong fit if you:
Have 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Have strong experience building backend systems with Java and Spring Boot.
Have designed and operated production-grade services at scale.
Understand distributed systems, micro-services, asynchronous processing, and event-driven architectures.
Have experience working with PostgreSQL or MySQL in production environments.
Have worked with Redis, caching strategies, and messaging systems such as Kafka.
Can design APIs and systems that are reliable, maintainable, and easy to evolve.
Have strong debugging, troubleshooting, and production incident management skills.
Collaborate effectively across teams and communicate technical ideas clearly.
Take ownership from problem definition through production support.
Technical Skills:
You should have strong practical experience across most of the following areas:
Java:
JVM Fundamentals, Memory Management, Collections Framework, Generics, Concurrency & Multithreading, Streams API, Exception Handling, Functional Programming Concepts, Performance Optimization, Garbage Collection Fundamentals.
Spring Ecosystem:
Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Data JPA, Spring Validation, Spring Scheduling, Spring Configuration, Dependency Injection, Transaction Management.
Databases:
PostgreSQL or MySQL, Query Optimization, Indexing, Transactions, Isolation Levels, Data Modeling, Database Migrations, Connection Pooling.
Distributed Systems:
Microservices Architecture, Event-Driven Architecture, Asynchronous Processing, Message Queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.), Service Communication, Distributed Transactions, Idempotency, Eventual Consistency, Caching Strategies, API Versioning.
Cloud & DevOps:
Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD Pipelines, AWS (or equivalent cloud platform), Infrastructure as Code (nice to have), Logging & Monitoring, Observability, Distributed Tracing.
Security:
OAuth2, OpenID Connect (OIDC), JWT, Authentication & Authorization, Secure API Development, OWASP Top 10, Secrets Management.
Our Tech Stack:
While experience with every technology isn't required, you'll likely work with:
Java 17+
Spring Boot
Spring Data JPA
Spring Security
PostgreSQL / MySQL
Redis
Kafka
Docker
Kubernetes
AWS
OpenTelemetry
GitHub Actions
Grafana
Prometheus
REST APIs
OAuth2 / OIDC / JWT
Engineering Principles:
At Quidax, we value engineers who:
Continuously improve engineering practices
Embrace feedback and continuous learning
Make thoughtful engineering trade-offs
Prioritize simplicity over unnecessary complexity
Take ownership beyond writing code
Build with reliability, scalability, and security in mind
Use data to guide technical decisions
Collaborate effectively across teams
Bonus Points If You Have:
Experience with Go (Golang).
Experience in fintech, crypto, payments, trading, or regulated industries.
Experience building exchange platforms, trading systems, or financial infrastructure.
Experience with WebSockets, market data systems, liquidity management, or exchange integrations.
Experience with Kubernetes, AWS, and cloud-native environments.
Experience with Domain-Driven Design (DDD), contract testing, or large-scale event-driven systems.
Reporting Line:
You'll report to the Engineering Manager and work closely with senior engineers, product managers, and mobile and frontend teammates to build and strengthen the core of our backend infrastructure.