Senior Software Engineer (Backend Java)

About Quidax

Quidax is where money meets limitless possibilities. Were making it super easy for individuals businesses and fintechs in Africa to access crypto. Our goal Providing real value for our customers today while shaping the future of money.

Were looking for engineers who enjoy solving difficult engineering problems at scale care deeply about software quality and take ownership beyond writing code. Youll work with product managers designers and engineers across multiple teams to build secure reliable and highly scalable financial systems.

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer youll design build and operate backend services that power critical parts of the Quidax platform.
Beyond implementation youll help shape technical direction mentor engineers improve engineering practices and contribute to building a world-class engineering culture.

Were looking for someone who can balance speed with quality make sound engineering trade-offs and take ownership of services from design through production.

What Youll Be Owning

Build & Scale Core Platform Services

Within your first 90 days:

• Deliver production-ready backend features independently.
• Become a trusted owner of one or more backend services.
• Contribute meaningfully to architecture and design discussions.
• Improve service reliability observability or performance in at least one area of the platform.

Within your first 6 months:

• Lead the design and implementation of complex backend systems.
• Drive improvements to engineering quality maintainability and developer experience.
• Help establish patterns and best practices for building scalable services.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews technical discussions and design collaboration.

Drive Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Own services throughout their lifecycle from design and implementation to deployment monitoring and production support.
• Improve system reliability observability security and performance.
• Investigate production incidents and drive long-term fixes rather than temporary workarounds.
• Continuously identify opportunities to simplify systems and reduce technical debt.

Contribute to Technical Direction

• Participate in architecture reviews and technical decision-making.
• Help shape how we design APIs distributed systems and internal platform services.
• Contribute to technical documentation RFCs and engineering standards.
• Make thoughtful engineering trade-offs between speed complexity scalability and maintainability.

Build a Strong Engineering Culture

• Review code and provide actionable feedback.
• Advocate for testing operational excellence and engineering best practices.
• Collaborate effectively across Product Design Compliance Risk and Engineering.
• Raise the bar for ownership quality and technical excellence.

Biggest Challenges Youll Tackle

Heres what will keep you up at night in the best possible way:

• Designing systems that handle high transaction volumes without sacrificing reliability.
• Building services that remain secure available and observable in a fast-moving financial environment.
• Balancing engineering speed with the quality standards expected of financial infrastructure.
• Simplifying increasingly complex systems as the platform grows.
• Debugging and solving difficult production issues where the answer isnt obvious.
• Scaling architecture processes and engineering practices alongside rapid business growth.

What Were Looking For

Were less interested in someone who simply knows Java and more interested in someone who has built and operated real production systems.

Youll likely be a strong fit if you:

• Have 6 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Have strong experience building backend systems with Java and Spring Boot.
• Have designed and operated production-grade services at scale.
• Understand distributed systems micro-services asynchronous processing and event-driven architectures.
• Have experience working with PostgreSQL or MySQL in production environments.
• Have worked with Redis caching strategies and messaging systems such as Kafka.
• Can design APIs and systems that are reliable maintainable and easy to evolve.
• Have strong debugging troubleshooting and production incident management skills.
• Collaborate effectively across teams and communicate technical ideas clearly.
• Take ownership from problem definition through production support.

Technical Skills

You should have strong practical experience across most of the following areas:

• Java:
  JVM Fundamentals Memory Management Collections Framework Generics Concurrency & Multithreading Streams API Exception Handling Functional Programming Concepts Performance Optimization Garbage Collection Fundamentals.
• Spring Ecosystem:
  Spring Boot Spring MVC Spring Security Spring Data JPA Spring Validation Spring Scheduling Spring Configuration Dependency Injection Transaction Management.
• Databases:
  PostgreSQL or MySQL Query Optimization Indexing Transactions Isolation Levels Data Modeling Database Migrations Connection Pooling.
• Distributed Systems:
  Microservices Architecture Event-Driven Architecture Asynchronous Processing Message Queues (Kafka RabbitMQ etc.) Service Communication Distributed Transactions Idempotency Eventual Consistency Caching Strategies API Versioning.
• Cloud & DevOps:
  Docker Kubernetes CI/CD Pipelines AWS (or equivalent cloud platform) Infrastructure as Code (nice to have) Logging & Monitoring Observability Distributed Tracing.
• Security:
  OAuth2 OpenID Connect (OIDC) JWT Authentication & Authorization Secure API Development OWASP Top 10 Secrets Management.

Our Tech Stack

While experience with every technology isnt required youll likely work with:

• Java 17
• Spring Boot
• Spring Data JPA
• Spring Security
• PostgreSQL / MySQL
• Redis
• Kafka
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• AWS
• OpenTelemetry
• GitHub Actions
• Grafana
• Prometheus
• REST APIs
• OAuth2 / OIDC / JWT

Engineering Principles

At Quidax we value engineers who:

• Continuously improve engineering practices
• Embrace feedback and continuous learning
• Make thoughtful engineering trade-offs
• Prioritize simplicity over unnecessary complexity
• Take ownership beyond writing code
• Build with reliability scalability and security in mind
• Use data to guide technical decisions
• Collaborate effectively across teams

Bonus Points If You Have

• Experience with Go (Golang).
• Experience in fintech crypto payments trading or regulated industries.
• Experience building exchange platforms trading systems or financial infrastructure.
• Experience with WebSockets market data systems liquidity management or exchange integrations.
• Experience with Kubernetes AWS and cloud-native environments.
• Experience with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) contract testing or large-scale event-driven systems.

Reporting Line

Youll report to the Engineering Manager and work closely with senior engineers product managers and mobile and frontend teammates to build and strengthen the core of our backend infrastructure.

Why Quidax

At Quidax were building the future of finance in Africa through crypto. Youll have the freedom to innovate the space to lead and the backing to build something that truly scales. If youre ready to build an engineering org that delivers excellence at scale lets talk.

Whats In It For YouWhen you join Quidax youre not just taking a job youre jumping into a community thats bold remote-first and building for the future. Heres what you get:

Fair Pay Ownership

• Competitive salary based on your skills and experience; annual merit-based reviews to keep your growth visible and rewarded

Growth Thats Real

Annual performance revi...