Lead Backend Engineer - PayLink

Role Overview

Lead Backend Engineer - PayLink at Salla. 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.

Role Purpose

Provide hands-on technical leadership for backend engineering, design and build payment-critical backend services and APIs, own code quality and team growth, and ensure correctness, reliability and security across services.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Provide hands-on technical leadership for backend engineering on a modern Java / Spring Boot stack.
• Design and build payment-critical backend services and APIs.
• Work closely with architecture and product teams.

Code Quality & Standards

• Own code quality: standards, code review, testing and release readiness.
• Ensure correctness, reliability and security across the services the team owns.

Team Development

• Mentor and grow backend engineers.

Qualifications & Experience

• 8+ years in Java backend with strong Spring Boot.
• Proven technical leadership while remaining hands-on in the code.
• Hands-on payments / fintech experience; 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).

Skills & Competencies

• Strong microservices and REST API design.
• Relational databases and automated testing.
• Delivery on containers (Kubernetes) with CI/CD.
• AI-augmented engineering; actively use AI coding tools such as Claude Code in day-to-day development.
• Experience with more than one payment processor / gateway (nice to have).
• Cloud platforms (OCI, AWS or Azure) (nice to have).
• Event-driven systems (Kafka) (nice to have).