Intermediate Java Engineer - Platform Engineering

Electrum is a next-generation payment software technology company.

Electrum is the leading payments software company enabling banks and retailers to power their payments and value-added services. Since 2012, we have established ourselves as a respected software partner through our deep expertise and track record in delivering trusted cloud-native payments solutions. Our systems process billions of high-volume, low-value transactions annually - the kind of payments millions of South Africans make every day without thinking about them. When our software is slow or down, people can't buy electricity or send money, so we take reliability seriously. See more about us here!

When you join the Electrum team, you’ll get to:

• Be part of the whole journey - from the first idea to a product running in production.
• Grow your skills through formal training and hands-on learning every day.
• Get mentorship from experienced engineers & leaders who are invested in your growth.
• Work in a collaborative, autonomous environment where good ideas can come from anyone.
• Tackle real client problems and see the impact of your work first-hand.
• Build a FinTech career on software that moves real money at scale.
  

The Role

We're looking for Java engineers who are interested in making the move into platform engineering. You'll join our Platforms team from day one.

Note: You don't need platform experience - we'll teach you, and you'll be working alongside engineers who've been through the same learning curve. And if you give it a proper go and find it isn't for you, there's a route back into backend engineering. We'd rather you try it and tell us than stay in a role that doesn't suit you.

Platforms builds the tooling every other team uses to build, release and run their software - Kubernetes clusters on AWS, Helm charts, GitOps deployments with ArgoCD, CI pipelines in GitHub Actions, and our own internal tooling to optimise development and deployment. The goal is to make the golden path of building, deploying and running our software the easiest one.

This is the layer underneath everything. Millions of South Africans use services that run on our platform every day, and none of them care that we're upgrading a cluster - payments don't get a maintenance window. Keeping that running means understanding how it all actually works: what happens between a git push and a pod serving live traffic, how a request moves through the service mesh, and what breaks when a node disappears mid-transaction. Over the next year, that includes work like:

• Upgrading our clusters and networking stack during business hours using blue/green node groups, moving live traffic across gradually without dropping a payment.
• Building a control plane that knows which version of every component is running in every environment, and flags what's falling behind.
• Stopping configuration drift, so an environment that's been running for years behaves the same as one we deployed last week.

Although there's still manual work today, our approach is to automate what we can, get rid of what we can't, and spend our time building the stack rather than closing tickets.

Why Java engineers? Most of what runs on our platform is Java. We don't write most of those services, but we need to understand deeply how they run - why a pod gets OOM-killed when the heap looks fine, how garbage collection copes with container memory limits, or why one service's latency spikes whenever another one scales. People who've built and debugged Java services already know where to start looking, and what product teams actually need from a platform.

From there, you'll go deeper: how software really behaves at scale in the cloud, from the JVM down through the container runtime, the network and the node. Then you'll build the tooling that diagnoses these problems - ideally automatically, before a developer (or a client) notices. If you've ever wished there was a better way to debug something in production, this is your chance to make it.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience in software development
• Anyone can write code. However, it takes a bit of experience to write code that balances elegance, maintainability, efficiency and quality.
• Be strong with Java
• You won't be writing backend services day to day, but the systems running on our platform are high-performance Java. Knowing the language well is what makes you compatible to the teams you'll support - and it keeps the door open if you want to move back into backend work later.
• A university degree or an equivalent number of years of relevant experience
• We require a degree or two additional years of relevant working experience in Java. This is because the role demands proven analytical skills, particularly in high-stakes (dealing with people's money) and highly complex environments. The work has a material impact and, while high-reward, it involves high risk. Therefore, on-the-job learning is insufficient; we need assurance that you possess the necessary expertise..

Advantageous for the role: (If you have an interest or exposure to any of these, let us know!)

1. Full-stack, SaaS, or Payments development experience.
2. Exposure to Cloud Infrastructure (AWS) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / CloudFormation).
3. Familiarity with containerisation and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker) and CI/CD pipelines.

Benefits

Why Join Electrum?

• We believe in a People First approach, ensuring a culture where you can thrive and make a real difference
  

Your Career & Culture

• Career Growth: Delivering world-class financial software is challenging, but your effort will earn you hands-on experience with products used by millions, accelerating your career.
• Strong Teams: We keep teams small, focused, and collaborative to maximize impact.
• Transparency: We openly discuss strategy, finances, and salaries. Mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities that we actively discuss.
• Autonomy: We trust you. You're expected to seek out the data needed for informed decisions and manage your own time - knowing when to focus and when to recharge.
• Shared Vision: You'll have the power to shape the vision of how we build the future of financial services.

Practical Perks

1. Here's how we support our culture:
• Flexible Work: Office-first environment with flexible hours.
• Generous Leave: Starting at 20 days per year.
• Office Perks (Cape Town): Fully-stocked kitchen and daily catered lunch.
2. Social Life: Regular team activities like hikes, getaways, and dinners