Lead Backend Engineer - PayLink
Salla · Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
A hands-on engineering lead who sets technical direction, owns code quality, and builds payment-critical backend services on a modern Java stack, while guiding and growing a team of backend engineers.
What you'll do
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for backend engineering on a modern Java / Spring Boot stack.
• Design and build payment-critical backend services and APIs.
• Own code quality: standards, code review, testing and release readiness.
• Ensure correctness, reliability and security across the services the team owns.
• Mentor and grow backend engineers, and work closely with architecture and product.
Requirements
• 8+ years in Java backend with strong Spring Boot.
• Proven technical leadership while remaining hands-on in the code.
• Hands-on payments / fintech experience is required — you have worked on real payment or financial-transaction systems.
• Hands-on experience with at least one payment processor or gateway (e.g. MPGS, Cybersource or mada). This is a requirement for this role.
• Strong microservices, REST API design, relational databases and automated testing.
• Delivery on containers (Kubernetes) with CI/CD.
• AI-augmented engineering — you actively use AI coding tools such as Claude Code in your day-to-day development. This is a requirement for this role.
Nice to have
• Experience with more than one payment processor / gateway.
• Cloud platforms (OCI, AWS or Azure); event-driven systems (Kafka).