Senior Backend Engineer (Java) at Benifex in Southampton, England, GB

Who are Benifex? 💚💜

We are a fast-moving technology company, and one of the most successful providers of online reward and benefits solutions in the world. We believe that everyone deserves an exceptional experience at work, every day, and build workplace technology that makes this happen. Benifex’s mission is to build remarkable experiences that employees love. Today Benifex supports more than five million employees in over 3,000 organisations across more than 100 countries. To help us on our quest to be the best, we need brilliant people on board and that’s where you come in. 🚀

Why should you apply? 🌟

• Impact: work on a product suite used by millions of people that improves employee experience and wellbeing.
• Scale: a big focus of our engineering teams is building features and services to support our 5mil+ customers globally.
• Autonomy: have an input into the product roadmap and technically lead features/services.
• Development: this is a crucial part of our aim to ensure a seamless experience across OneHub.
• Top 10 Employer, Sunday Times Best Places to Work Awards
• Work for a profitable, fast-growing market leader in the online reward and benefits space

**Please note we are unable to offer visa sponsorship and require to people to be based in the UK or Ireland for this position**

Great benefits: 💰 £75,000-90,000 💻 Tech setup of your choice (MacBook Pro or equivalent, monitors, etc.) 📚 £/€800 annual learning budget, plus two hours per week as ‘Focus Fridays’. 🤸 Flexible work – choose a working setup that works for you, our only ask is to see you once a quarter in our UK HQ ✈️ 25 days holiday plus your local bank holidays 🎂 Your birthday off ❤️ Two half day wellbeing days 🩺 Healthcare cash plan to cover the costs of day to day healthcare 🧠 Employee Assistance Plan 24/7 365 support 🤒 Income Protection (75%) and life assurance (4x salary) 🤑 Pension scheme 🌟 Enhanced parental leave package - 26 weeks fully paid maternity leave and 4 weeks fully paid paternity leave 💳 £50 monthly allowance to spend on whatever takes your fancy, your very own Benifex card will be topped up at the start of each month!

Role Overview 🚀

Ready to shape the core experience that connects everything our customers do across the Benifex platform?

We're looking for a skilled Senior Backend Engineer to help evolve our Unified Profile service - the central source of truth for user identities, preferences, and cross-product data.

You'll design and build robust, API-driven, event-oriented services that power a seamless, consistent experience across multiple products.

If you're passionate about clean APIs, data modelling, event-driven architecture, and setting architectural direction, this role puts you right at the heart of the platform.

Stack: Java, Spring Boot, REST API's, MongoDB, Golang, Docker, Kubernetes, GCP.

Responsibilities 🤘

Core Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain high-quality REST APIs and backend services using Java and Spring Boot.
• Implement and evolve event-driven workflows using Google Cloud Pub/Sub to synchronise profile data across multiple products.
• Ensure the Unified Profile remains a reliable, scalable, and accurate source of truth for user identity and profile attributes.
• Improve the performance, reliability, and observability of the service (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting).

Architecture & Technical Direction

• Work closely with the Principal Engineer to influence the future architecture of profile management, data contracts, and event schemas.
• Contribute to the design and evolution of domain events, ensuring schema consistency, forward compatibility, and good modelling practices.
• Drive engineering standards across the squad, including testing strategy, CI/CD improvements, and code quality practices.

Collaboration

• Collaborate with product teams across the organisation to integrate Unified Profile into their services and support shared use cases.
• Partner with Platform, Data Engineering, and Security teams to ensure APIs, events, and data flows are compliant, secure, and well-governed.
• Work with frontend and mobile engineers to define clear, well-documented APIs (OpenAPI/Swagger).

Leadership & Mentorship

• Provide technical mentorship to engineers in the team, supporting growth, knowledge sharing, and sound engineering practice.
• Participate in architectural discussions, design reviews, and incident retrospectives, bringing strong backend expertise.

What are we looking for? 🔎

Technical Fundamentals

• Strong experience building high-performance backend systems with Java and Spring Boot
• Solid understanding of event-driven architecture (EDA) and distributed system principles
• Practical experience with messaging systems (e.g., Google Cloud Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, or similar)
• Experience working with NoSQL databases, ideally MongoDB Atlas
• Comfortable working with and supporting production services in cloud environments
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.)

Ways of Working

• Experience working in a fast-paced agile environment, with a focus on flow efficiency, reducing WIP, and getting stories to Done
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills

Leadership & Growth

• Experience mentoring or technically leading engineers, fostering growth and supporting good engineering practices

Bonus Points! ⭐

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Experience with Keycloak or other identity/auth frameworks
• Experience with observability tooling (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus)

Even if you don't meet all of the requirements for this role, we encourage you to apply! We are looking for talented and passionate individuals who are eager to learn and grow. We also offer a variety of other roles, so please check out our careers page to see if there is something else that might be a good fit for you.

Our interview process

Benifex understand the need to have a fast and efficient process, the below will all be completed in the shortest time possible, typically a 2-2.5 week timeframe.

📞 Initial informal call with the Talent team

⏳ Interview with our Engineering Director 30-45 min

🧪 Technical Task

🔎 Technical Interview - 60 min

🤩 Final interview with VP of Engineering - 30-45 min

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcome and respected. We believe that diversity and inclusion are essential to our success, and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

We are a proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme.