Senior Backend Engineer (Java) in Southampton

About Benifex

Benifex is a fast‑moving technology company and one of the most successful providers of online reward and benefits solutions. We build workplace technology that creates exceptional employee experiences. Our mission is to build remarkable experiences that employees love. Today, Benifex supports more than five million employees in over 3,000 organisations across more than 100 countries.

Why Apply

• Impact: work on a product suite used by millions of people that improves employee experience and wellbeing.
• Scale: build features and services to support our 5 million+ customers globally.
• Autonomy: influence the product roadmap and technically lead features and services.
• Development: ensure a seamless experience across OneHub.
• Recognition: Top 10 Employer, Sunday Times Best Places to Work Award recipient.
• Work for a profitable, fast‑growing market leader in the online reward and benefits space.

Salary and Benefits

• Tech setup of your choice (MacBook Pro or equivalent, monitors, etc.)
• £/€800 annual learning budget, plus two hours per week as ‘Focus Fridays’.
• Flexible work – choose a working setup that works for you; we ask you to visit our UK HQ once a quarter.
• 25 days holiday plus local bank holidays.
• Birthday off.
• Two half‑day wellbeing days.
• Healthcare cash plan covering day‑to‑day costs.
• Employee Assistance Plan 24/7/365 support.
• Income protection (75 %) and life assurance (4× salary).
• Pension scheme.
• Enhanced parental leave: 26 weeks fully paid maternity leave and 4 weeks fully paid paternity leave.
• £50 monthly allowance with a dedicated Benifex card.

Role Overview

We are looking for a skilled Senior Backend Engineer to evolve our Unified Profile service—the central source of truth for user identities, preferences, and cross‑product data. You will design and build robust, API‑driven, event‑oriented services that power a seamless, consistent experience across multiple products. If you are passionate about clean APIs, data modelling, event‑driven architecture, and setting architectural direction, this role places you at the heart of the platform.

Stack

Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, MongoDB, Golang, Docker, Kubernetes, GCP.

Responsibilities

Core Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain high‑quality REST APIs and backend services using Java and Spring Boot.
• Implement and evolve event‑driven workflows using Google Cloud Pub/Sub to synchronise profile data across multiple products.
• Ensure the Unified Profile remains a reliable, scalable, and accurate source of truth for user identity and profile attributes.
• Improve performance, reliability, and observability of the service (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting).

Architecture & Technical Direction

• Work closely with the Principal Engineer to influence future architecture of profile management, data contracts, and event schemas.
• Contribute to the design and evolution of domain events, ensuring schema consistency, forward compatibility, and good modelling practices.
• Drive engineering standards across the squad, including testing strategy, CI/CD improvements, and code quality practices.

Collaboration

• Collaborate with product teams to integrate Unified Profile into their services and support shared use cases.
• Partner with Platform, Data Engineering and Security teams to ensure APIs, events, and data flows are compliant, secure, and well‑governed.
• Work with frontend and mobile engineers to define clear, well‑documented APIs (OpenAPI/Swagger).

Leadership & Mentorship

• Provide technical mentorship to engineers in the team, supporting growth, knowledge sharing, and sound engineering practice.
• Participate in architectural discussions, design reviews, and incident retrospectives, bringing strong backend expertise.

Qualifications

Technical Fundamentals

• Strong experience building high‑performance backend systems with Java and Spring Boot.
• Solid understanding of event‑driven architecture and distributed system principles.
• Practical experience with messaging systems such as Google Cloud Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ or similar.
• Experience working with NoSQL databases, ideally MongoDB Atlas.
• Comfortable working with and supporting production services in cloud environments.
• Hands‑on experience with CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.).

Ways of Working

• Experience working in a fast‑paced agile environment focused on flow efficiency, reducing WIP, and getting stories to Done.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem‑solving skills.

Leadership & Growth

• Experience mentoring or technically leading engineers, fostering growth and supporting good engineering practices.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Experience with Keycloak or other identity/auth frameworks.
• Experience with observability tooling such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus.

Application Process

• Initial informal call with the Talent team.
• Interview with our Engineering Director (30‑45 min).
• Technical Task.
• Technical Interview (60 min).
• Final interview with VP of Engineering (30‑45 min).

We are an equal‑opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status. We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcome and respected. We are a proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme.