Software Engineer Senior (Backend/Java/Springboot) at Sanlam Group

What will you do?

• At Sanlam Life & Savings, technology is more than systems and platforms. It’s how we enable millions of South Africans to plan, protect, and grow their financial futures.
• We’re looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer who loves building robust, well designed software — someone who’s motivated by scale, impact, and technical craftsmanship, and who wants to help modernise and shape one of the country’s largest financial services environments.
• As a Senior Backend Software Engineer, you’ll be a core member of a modern, product aligned engineering squad, working closely with product, architecture, and platform teams to deliver meaningful outcomes.

Output/Core Tasks:

• Actively participate in agile ceremonies (stand‑ups, planning, reviews, retrospectives) and contribute to continuous improvement of team ways of working.
• Collaborate with the Product Owner and Tech Lead to translate product and business requirements into well‑scoped technical work and delivery increments.
• Take ownership of delivering high‑quality software that meets sprint and release goals, with a strong focus on reliability, maintainability, and performance.
• Contribute to solution design and technical decision‑making, ensuring alignment with agreed architectural standards and patterns.
• Write clean, well‑tested, and well‑documented code, adhering to engineering best practices and team coding standards.
• Embed quality into development through unit tests, integration tests, and automated checks as part of the CI/CD pipeline.
• Support deployment, observability, and operational readiness of services across testing and production environments, working closely with platform and DevOps teams.
• Communicate progress, risks, and dependencies transparently within the team, and proactively raise issues that may impact delivery.
• Share knowledge, patterns, and learnings with peers through code reviews, documentation, and informal mentoring.
• Continuously improve your technical skills and contribute to improving the team’s engineering practices, tools, and delivery capabilities.

What will make you successful in this role?

Requirements:

Qualifications:   

• Relevant Computer Science degree or diploma
• Honours or postgraduate degree preferred
• Java Certification will be advantageous

Experience:  

• 5+ years’ professional experience building and maintaining enterprise grade backend applications using Java.
• Proven experience working as a senior individual contributor within agile delivery teams, contributing to production systems at scale.

Backend & Java Engineering

• Strong proficiency in Java, with a deep understanding of object oriented design principles, data structures, and core language constructs.
• Solid experience designing and building server side applications using the Spring ecosystem, including Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Data, and Spring Batch.
• Experience building and integrating RESTful APIs for internal and external consumers.

Architecture & Design

• Hands on experience with microservices/ miniservices based architectures, including common design patterns, service integration, and resilience considerations.
• Ability to contribute to solution design and technical discussions, balancing functional requirements with non functional concerns (performance, security, scalability, maintainability).

Testing & Quality Engineering

• Strong experience with automated testing practices, including unit and integration testing using frameworks such as JUnit and Mockito.
• Understanding of testability, clean code principles, and embedding quality into the development lifecycle.

DevOps & Delivery

• Practical experience working within CI/CD pipelines and modern delivery workflows.
• Hands on exposure to build and deployment tooling such as Maven, Gradle, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with version control and collaboration tools including Git, Jira, and Confluence.
• Experience supporting deployments and operational readiness in test and production environments.

Data & Persistence

• Experience working with relational databases and ORM technologies, including JPA and Hibernate.
• Ability to design and work with data models and SQL as part of backend service implementation.
• Enterprise & Platform Context (Advantageous)
• Experience with enterprise integration and middleware technologies (e.g. messaging platforms, application servers).
• Exposure to large scale enterprise environments and legacy platforms, with the ability to modernise or integrate where required.
• Ways of Working
• Good understanding of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and agile development practices.
• Experience working within scaled agile or large delivery environments is advantageous.
• Domain Knowledge (Advantageous)
• Experience within financial services environments, particularly life insurance or related domains, is beneficial.

Knowledge:   

• Sound knowledge of backend architecture concepts, including service‑based designs, integration patterns, and non‑functional considerations (performance, security, resilience).
• Solid grounding in clean code and object‑oriented design principles, and how they support maintainable systems.
• Understanding of impact and risk analysis for technical changes across applications, data, and dependent systems.
• Knowledge of modern software delivery practices, including CI/CD concepts, release management, and production readiness.
• Familiarity with quality engineering concepts, including automated testing strategies and their role in fast, reliable delivery.
• Understanding of agile and iterative delivery models and how cross‑functional teams collaborate to deliver outcomes.

Competencies:   

• Strong analytical and problem‑solving ability, with attention to detail and numerical accuracy.
• Able to think conceptually and translate complex problems into practical solutions.
• Clear and effective communicator, able to collaborate well with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Results‑oriented, taking ownership of outcomes and following through on commitments.
• Strong quality mindset, with a focus on building reliable, maintainable solutions.
• Curious and learning‑oriented, actively seeking to improve skills and stay current with evolving technologies and practices.