Senior Backend Engineer - E-Commerce (m/w/d) in Birmingham

As a Senior Java Backend Engineer at Spica, you will help shape the services, integrations, and platform foundations behind GemEx, our workplace experience platform used to connect people, buildings, data, and workplace technology. This is a senior engineering role with real influence: you will design resilient backend services, contribute to architectural decisions, support production reliability, and help raise engineering standards across the team.

Spica is a fast-growing specialist digital solution provider, combining web, desktop and mobile user experiences, systems integration, and IoT technology to help organisations make better use of emerging workplace technologies. As a PropTech business, we create digital products that improve workplace experience, building performance, and operational insight. Our GemEx platform combines Digital Twin capabilities, workplace analytics, IoT sensing technologies, and integrations with key business systems.

People Not Numbers – We pride ourselves on nurturing long-term partnerships, and our team is at the heart of everything we do. You will join a multidisciplinary product engineering team responsible for developing advanced workplace experience solutions across Digital Twin capabilities, IoT integrations, workplace analytics, mobile applications, and customer-facing web experiences. Working closely with frontend engineers, mobile developers, product managers, and solution architects, you will design, build, and maintain the core backend services that power our platform. You will also play a senior role in evolving the platform architecture, improving performance and reliability, mentoring others, and supporting the adoption of modern engineering practices.

Backend engineering:

• Design, develop, test, and maintain Java backend services, RESTful APIs, integrations, relational data models, and event-driven distributed applications.
• Contribute to architectural decisions, platform scalability, performance, resilience, observability, deployment automation, and production readiness.
• Work closely with frontend, mobile, product, support, and operations teams to deliver high-quality features and minimise customer impact during incidents.
• Help maintain availability, improve observability, and support continuous improvement of production environments.
• This role includes participation in a shared out-of-hours support and release rota, including scheduled releases and occasional incident support outside normal business hours.

Requirements:

• Strong commercial experience developing applications with Java (Java 17+ preferred).
• Strong SQL skills and experience with JDBC.
• Experience with relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Experience writing automated tests, including unit, integration, and contract tests.
• Experience working within Agile delivery teams.
• Exposure to Angular and TypeScript.
• Experience with AWS cloud services.
• Oracle Java certification.

How We Build Software:

• Agile product squads with two-week sprint cycles.
• Automated testing and CI/CD pipelines.
• Cloud-native architecture on AWS.
• Contribute to improving engineering standards, automation, and platform performance.
• Identify opportunities to improve quality, scalability, reliability, and user experience.

Typically four or more years’ experience in backend software engineering, with evidence of senior-level ownership and technical influence. A degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, another numerate discipline, or equivalent practical experience. Willingness to participate in a shared out-of-hours support and release rota.

A meaningful opportunity to help scale a thriving SaaS product business with a platform used in modern workplace environments. Pension in line with auto-enrolment requirements. Flexible working arrangements. Hybrid office working. 25 days annual leave plus.