Backend Engineer (Java) in Southampton

Who are Benifex? We are a fast-moving technology company, and one of the most successful providers of online reward and benefits solutions in the world. We believe that everyone deserves an exceptional experience at work, every day, and build workplace technology that makes this happen. Benifex’s 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. To help us on our quest to be the best, we need brilliant people on board and that’s where you come in.

Why should you apply?

• Growth: You'll own features end-to-end on a key product, with senior engineers alongside you to help you break down bigger problems and grow your scope.
• A clear path forward: We have published Engineering Career Pathways from Associate to Principal, so you know exactly what good looks like at your level and what the next step looks like.
• Technology: AI-first by default, we're building our SDLC around AI-assisted engineering, and you'll be learning and shaping this alongside the rest of the team, not inheriting a finished playbook.
• Team: Work with a talented, experienced group of engineers dedicated to building high quality products for our users.

Role Overview

Ready to shape the core experience that connects everything our customers do across the Benifex platform? We're looking for a skilled Backend Engineer to work on the services that contribute to the Core Experience for our customers and their employees. The team owns the entry point to our benefits product suite - Home, content creation, global navigation, search, translations. You'll design and build robust, API-driven, event-oriented services that power a seamless, consistent experience across multiple products. If you're passionate about clean APIs, data modelling, event-driven architecture, and setting architectural direction, this role puts you right at the heart of the platform.

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

Please note we are unable to offer visa sponsorship and require people to be based in the UK or Ireland for this position.

Great benefits:

• £45,000-75,000
• 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, our only ask is to see you once a quarter in the office and you must be based in the UK or Ireland.
• Full access to our comprehensive benefits package, including discounts from hundreds of high street brands, salary sacrifice schemes across Finance, Health, Tech, and more.
• 25 days holiday plus your local bank holidays.
• Your birthday off.
• Two half day wellbeing days.
• Healthcare cash plan to cover the costs of day-to-day healthcare.
• Employee Assistance Plan 24/7 365 support.
• Income Protection (75%) and life assurance (4x salary).
• Referral bonuses.
• Enhanced parental leave package - 26 weeks fully paid maternity leave and 4 weeks fully paid paternity leave.
• Work from Anywhere policy for 90 days.
• Buy and Sell scheme for holidays.
• £50 monthly allowance to spend on whatever takes your fancy, your very own Benifex card will be topped up at the start of each month!

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. Improve the performance, reliability, and observability of the service (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting).
• Architecture & Technical Direction: Work closely with Senior Engineers and the rest of your team to influence the future architecture of our systems, data contracts, and event schemas. Contribute to the design and evolution of domain events, ensuring schema consistency, forward compatibility, and good modelling practices. Influence engineering standards across the squad, including testing strategy, CI/CD improvements, and code quality practices.
• Collaboration: Collaborate with product teams across the organisation to establish API contracts and deliver features. 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: Participate in architectural discussions, design reviews, and incident retrospectives, bringing strong backend expertise.

What are we looking for?

• Technical Fundamentals: Experience building high-performance backend systems with Java and Spring Boot. Solid understanding of event-driven architecture (EDA) and distributed system principles. Practical experience with messaging systems (e.g., 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, with a focus on flow efficiency, reducing WIP, and getting stories to Done. Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.
• Bonus Points! Experience mentoring engineers, fostering growth and supporting good engineering practices. Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Experience with Keycloak or other identity/auth frameworks. Experience with observability tooling (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus).

Even if you don't meet all of the requirements for this role, we encourage you to apply! We are looking for talented and passionate individuals who are eager to learn and grow. We also offer a variety of other roles, so please check out our careers page to see if there is something else that might be a good fit for you.

Our interview process: Benifex understands the need to have a fast and efficient process, the below will all be completed in the shortest time possible.

• Initial informal call with the Talent team.
• Interview with our Engineering Manager 30 min.
• Technical Task.
• Technical Interview - 60 min.
• Final interview with VP of Engineering - 30-45 min.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. 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 believe that diversity and inclusion are essential to our success, and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are a proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme. If you require any reasonable adjustments at any stage during the recruitment process, please let us know with your application.