We're hiring a hands-on Tech Lead (Backend) to join the Lending platform. You'll be the technical owner for backend microservices : designing and building resilient, secure, and observable services, guiding architectural decisions and collaborating across product, front-end, and cloud teams. This role combines development, architecture, mentoring and delivery leadership.

What you'll do :

- Lead design and development of backend microservices (Spring Boot) that power lending flows and integrations.

- Own service architecture, APIs, contract definitions (OpenAPI/Swagger) and versioning strategy.

- Design and implement secure authentication & authorization patterns (OAuth2, JWT, mTLS, SAML, etc.).

- Build and operate services on Kubernetes : deployments, config/secret management (e.g. K8s Secrets, HashiCorp Vault), horizontal scaling and health checks.

- Define CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and release strategies for safe, repeatable delivery.

- Collaborate with front-end and product teams to define APIs, SLAs, and integration contracts.

- Work with cloud infrastructure and platform teams on load balancing, network design, observability, incident response and cost-conscious architecture.

- Integrate and secure third-party services (payment providers, fraud engines, ID providers, document services).

- Coach and mentor engineers; lead technical design reviews and runbooks; evangelise best practices.

- Evaluate and propose AI/ML-assisted solutions where they add value (e.g., document analysis, automation, assistive features).

Must-have skills & experience :

- Strong Java/Spring Boot experience (production microservices). Comfortable with JDK 17 or later.

- Deep understanding of microservices architecture patterns : service discovery, circuit breakers, retries, idempotency, sagas/transactions.

- Practical experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes (Helm, kustomize or similar).

- Experience with secrets/config management (K8s Secrets, Vault, SOPS, Parameter Store).

- Solid knowledge of authentication & security (OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, TLS, secure API design).

- Experience designing and publishing OpenAPI/Swagger contracts and working with contract-first approaches.

- Familiar with CI/CD tooling and pipelines (Jenkins/GitHub Actions/GitLab CI/ArgoCD etc).

- Good understanding of cloud components (load balancers, VPC/subnetting, managed services, observability stacks).

- Experience integrating with third-party APIs and handling production-grade reliability.

- Strong communication skills and the ability to translate technical trade-offs to stakeholders.

Nice-to-have :

- Terraform (infrastructure as code) experience.

- Azure platform experience (AKS, Azure Load Balancer, Key Vault etc).

- Salesforce integration experience (APIs, data flows, authentication with Salesforce).

- Experience or interest in applying AI/ML to product problems (document classification, extraction, recommendations).

- Familiarity with API gateways (Kong, Istio, AWS API Gateway), service meshes (Kong Mesh, Istio), and event-driven patterns (Kafka).

- Front-end awareness : ability to collaborate on UI/API contracts and understand UX implications.

- Knowledge of performance tuning, JVM profiling and capacity planning.

Personal attributes :

- Pragmatic, delivery-focused and obsessed with reliability and observability.

- Collaborative - you enjoy working cross-functionally and mentoring peers.

- Comfortable making trade-offs and documenting reasoning for future teams.

- Customer-centric mindset - you put user and business outcomes first.