Backend Engineer (Java)

About Benifex

Benifex is a rapidly growing technology company renowned globally for delivering outstanding online reward and benefits solutions. We empower over five million employees across more than 3,000 organizations in upwards of 100 countries to experience an exceptional workplace environment every day. Our mission is to craft remarkable employee experiences through innovative workplace technology.

Why Join Us

• End-to-end ownership of significant product features, collaborating closely with senior engineers to tackle complex problems and expand your impact.
• Clear career progression paths defined from Associate to Principal levels, offering transparency on performance expectations and advancement opportunities.
• Embracing AI-first development, you will help shape our software lifecycle processes enhanced by AI tools rather than inheriting established methodologies.
• Join a highly skilled team dedicated to delivering high-quality products that delight users.
• Recognized as Sunday Times Best Place to Work 2025 and Best Large Tech Company to Work For 2025.
• Contribute to a profitable, fast-growing leader in the online rewards and benefits market.

Role Overview

As a Backend Engineer within our Core Experience team, you will develop key backend services that unify customer interactions across the Benifex platform—covering areas such as the Home interface, content creation, global navigation, search functions, and translations. Your work will involve designing and building resilient, API-centric, event-driven services to ensure seamless and consistent multi-product user experiences.

This role centers on crafting clean APIs, advanced data modeling, event-driven architecture, and influencing technical strategy at the platform level.

Technical Stack

Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, MongoDB, Golang, Docker, Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Important Location Note

Applicants must be based in the UK or Ireland as visa sponsorship is not offered. Onsite presence is required.

Benefits

• Annual salary ranging from £45,000 to £75,000.
• Choice of tech setup including MacBook Pro or equivalent with monitors.
• £800 annual learning budget plus two hours every week dedicated for focused learning ('Focus Fridays').
• Flexible work arrangements: primarily remote with a requirement to attend the office quarterly.
• Comprehensive benefits package including high street brand discounts and salary sacrifice schemes related to finance, health, and technology.
• 25 days annual leave plus local bank holidays and your birthday off.
• Two half-day wellbeing days annually.
• Healthcare cash plan covering day-to-day medical costs.
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Program.
• Income protection covering 75% of salary and life insurance at four times salary.
• Referral bonus program.
• Enhanced parental leave: 26 weeks fully paid maternity and 4 weeks fully paid paternity leave.
• Work from Anywhere policy permitting 90 days remote work.
• Holiday buy/sell scheme.
• £50 monthly allowance on a Benifex card for discretionary spending.

Core Responsibilities

• Develop, maintain and optimize robust RESTful APIs and backend services using Java and Spring Boot.
• Build and enhance event-driven processes using Google Cloud Pub/Sub to synchronize profile data across multiple products.
• Enhance service performance, dependability, and monitoring through advanced logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting implementations.
• Collaborate with senior engineers and peers to shape the architectural future of systems, data protocols, and event schema design.
• Contribute to the formulation and upkeep of domain event standards, ensuring consistency, forward compatibility, and strong modeling practices.
• Elevate engineering best practices including testing strategies, continuous integration and delivery, and code quality within the squad.
• Partner with various product teams to define API contracts and deliver new product features.
• Work alongside platform, security, and data engineering teams to guarantee compliance, security, and governance of APIs, events, and data flows.
• Collaborate with frontend and mobile developers to produce clear, documented APIs using OpenAPI/Swagger specifications.
• Participate actively in architectural reviews, design discussions, and post-incident analyses, leveraging strong backend expertise.

Essential Qualifications

• Proven experience building high-performance backend systems with Java and Spring Boot frameworks.
• Strong understanding of event-driven architecture and distributed system design principles.
• Hands-on experience with messaging platforms such as Google Cloud Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, or similar technologies.
• Familiarity with NoSQL databases, preferably MongoDB Atlas.
• Experience supporting production services deployed in cloud environments.
• Competence with CI/CD pipeline tools like CircleCI, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
• Experience working in fast-paced, agile teams focused on flow efficiency, Work In Progress control, and rapid delivery.
• Excellent communication skills, collaborative attitude, and solid problem-solving abilities.

Additional Advantages

• Previous mentoring experience fostering the development and growth of engineers.
• Experience working with Google Cloud Platform services.
• Familiarity with identity and authentication frameworks such as Keycloak.
• Knowledge of observability tools including OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and Prometheus.

Recruitment Procedures

• Initial informal conversation with the Talent team.
• Short technical interview with the Engineering Manager (30 minutes).
• Technical challenge assignment.
• Comprehensive technical interview (60 minutes).
• Final discussion with the VP of Engineering (30-45 minutes).

Inclusion and Diversity

We are an inclusive employer valuing diversity and do not engage in discrimination based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations during the recruitment process upon request and uphold the standards of the Disability Confident employer scheme.