Summary
Salla is hiring a Lead Backend Engineer in Jeddah to provide hands-on technical leadership and guide a team of backend engineers. The role involves designing payment-critical services and APIs on Java and Spring Boot, maintaining code quality, and ensuring reliability and security. Applicants need 8+ years of Java backend experience, hands-on payments or fintech experience, and experience with a payment processor or gateway. The role also requires microservices, REST API design, automated testing, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and day-to-day use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code.
The posting
As published on salla.com. Pulled from the employer's site and shown as they wrote it.
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.
What you'll do
- Provide hands-on technical leadership for backend engineering on a modern Java / Spring Boot stack.
- Design and build payment-critical backend services and APIs.
- Own code quality: standards, code review, testing and release readiness.
- Ensure correctness, reliability and security across the services the team owns.
- Mentor and grow backend engineers, and work closely with architecture and product.
Requirements
- 8+ years in Java backend with strong Spring Boot.
- Proven technical leadership while remaining hands-on in the code.
- Hands-on payments / fintech experience is required — 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). This is a requirement for this role.
- Strong microservices, REST API design, relational databases and automated testing.
- Delivery on containers (Kubernetes) with CI/CD.
- AI-augmented engineering — you actively use AI coding tools such as Claude Code in your day-to-day development. This is a requirement for this role.
Nice to have
- Experience with more than one payment processor / gateway.
- Cloud platforms (OCI, AWS or Azure); event-driven systems (Kafka).