Java Technical Lead

Role: Senior Java Software Engineer, Software Engineering team

Location: Johannesburg, South Africa (hybrid).

What You Will Do

• Review and approve pull requests, and reject changes that carry architectural, security or operational risk even when the tests pass
• Own the Java, API, testing, logging and release standards, and make sure every country team follows them
• Guide Java and Spring Boot microservices (including reactive ones) and check OpenAPI specs before development starts
• Stop duplicate APIs and integrations by checking whether a capability already exists
• Assess the impact of changes to shared libraries, parent POMs and logging tools before release
• Automate controls with GitHub rulesets, CODEOWNERS, quality gates and CI/CD checks
• Drive fixes for SonarQube, dependency and security findings
• Lead troubleshooting, root-cause analysis and JDK / Spring upgrades
• Mentor engineers, run workshops and document decisions

What You Need

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years in Java and Spring
• 3-5 years as a senior, lead or technical lead engineer
• Experience reviewing other teams' code and influencing decisions without direct authority
• Java (modern JDK), Spring Boot, WebFlux, Maven
• REST, OpenAPI / Swagger, microservices, distributed systems
• Git / GitHub, CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes (AKS)
• JUnit, Mockito, MockMvc, WebTestClient
• OAuth 2.0, TLS / mTLS, OWASP API security
• Logging, tracing, metrics and production diagnostics