JAVA Developer (Senior) at Discovery Limited

Key Purpose

Our Software Engineers play a critical role in Vitality’s successful business model by building and maintaining software solutions, in line with quality and time parameters, to enable operation as a fully integrated composite business, offering brilliant products with seamless, intuitive customer journeys.

The Associate Software Engineer learns on the job by delivering software components.  They support development, delivery and maintenance of Vitality software products and develop skills whilst working under supervision to deliver stories in a multidisciplinary team.  They understand the different types of testing and are aware of, but not responsible for, security. This role will not sit on problems, but proactively seek guidance from others to progress.

Key outputs:

Implement the software development life cycle: Build, maintain, test, deliver, release and document user-friendly and customer centric software solutions, as required.

• Takes ownership to identify, locate and competently fix faults and provides route cause analysis and recommendations; plans and implements releases, troubleshoots, and provides support as required.
• Is competent in working with monitoring tools, interprets the detail and monitors and supports production and non-production platforms.
• Fully comprehends appropriate architectural patterns designs that address the scope of the business problems and coaches these to others.
• Contributes to enterprise architectural decision making by way of being a subject matter expert in the scope of a core application technology or technical specialism.
• Designs systems characterised by medium levels of risk, impact and business or technical complexity.
• Selects appropriate design standards, methods and tools and ensures they are applied effectively.
• Reviews the systems designs of others to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology.
• Participates in peer reviews, providing insightful observations and guidance, addressing coding problems in a clear and respectful manner.
• Applies information security, designing solutions and services with security controls embedded, specifically engineered as mitigation against security threats as a core part of the solutions and services.

Deliver to standards: Understand, adhere to, and apply Vitality’s defined technical and process standards to ensure the effective management of risks and the protection of Vitality’s data.

• Accesses documents, guides, principles, and rules through the relevant Vitality knowledge base and both refers and applies to work, although under guidance. 
• Uses automation and peer review to assess the knowledge and application of the standards.
• Developing an understanding of “ready” and definition of “done”.
• Provide guidance to other software engineers, and 3rd parties, on adherence to these standards to ensure the effective application across Vitality. 
• Question, provide insight, ideas and input into how the standards could better support Vitality, including includes making recommendations to update existing or create new standards.
• Actively undertake required updates to documents in line with the agreed process and definition of “done” and “ready” and peer review document updates as requested.

Provide integrated solutions: Ensure solutions are user-focused, strategically aligned and effectively integrated across multiple teams and platforms to ensure the business needs are met.

• Observe and engage with others to understand the context of the application and where it fits into the wider landscape.
• Attend and actively participate in the relevant operating forums and attend project meetings, scrum meetings and other relevant forums to learn more about the business to better understand how to provide integrated solutions.
• Build and test software in line with the design specifications to ensure the required integration.
• Enable the integration testing of components for other teams prior to implementation. 
• Provide support and guidance and sign off on the delivery of their software to ensure required integration.
• Work within and across teams to ensure seamless integration and support planning and management teams to understand the impact on the delivery process.
• Evaluate and define approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so and offering recommendations on the best tools and methods to be used.
• Identify process optimisation opportunities with guidance and contribute to the implementation of proposed solutions.

Engage stakeholders: Collaborate, work with, and develop an understanding of the needs and requirements of both internal and external stakeholders to achieve the desired outcomes.

• Responsible for the stakeholder relationship leads and presents engagements with internal stakeholders, proactively collaborate with stakeholders
• Work with teams across the business at all levels to understand the business requirements, technology design, and story playback.
• Facilitate meetings and guide discussion, engaging at a high level to negotiate and resolve complex or significant conflicts, issues, and change requirements
• Collaborate with others to review specifications and use these agreed specifications to design, code, test and document programs or scripts of medium to high complexity, using the right standards and tools.

Build and transfer skills and knowledge: Take responsibility for developing personal skills and expertise aligned to role.

• Works independently within the framework of Vitality’s modern technology platform (e.g., Micro Services tools such as Kubernetes / Springboot).
• Coach and mentor other software engineers in relation to assigned coding languages/s.
• They understand 3rd party / COTS packages.
• Create learning opportunities (lunch & learn / developer forum / case studies / learning circles) for other software engineers across domains by initiating and conducting sessions to develop skills and knowledge in line with the needs of the business.

Collaborate within and across teams: Work effectively together with others across varying areas of expertise to achieve the required results. 

Personal Attributes and Skills:

• An excellent communicator and motivator.
• Emotional intelligence or at a minimum, understand impact of decisions on people, workflows, and business.
• Technical fluency to effectively work with processes and workflows.

Education:

• Matric
• A bachelor’s degree or Diploma in Computer Sciences/ Information Systems or equivalent IT tertiary qualification or Formal Java Qualification

Experience and Knowledge:

• 5 years’ systems development experience in Java, Java EE
• An excellent understanding of Enterprise Data architectures
• Strong technical skills in Java (Spring Boot, Hibernate), AWS microservices, Oracle, Mongo & PostGres.
• Strong Microservices experience is required including Design.
• A solid understanding of event driven architecture
• IntelliJ Eclipse IDE
• JUnit with unit and integration tests
• JIRA, Confluence, Git with BitBucket Code versioning
• Splunk, Dynatrace, Kibana experience
• SOAP, XML, XSLT, Web Services experience
• JMS, Tibco EMS experience
• JSP, html, Struts experience
• EJB 3, & EJB 2 experience
• EAP 7 Server