Senior Java Product Engineer at Absa Group Limited (Absa)

Job Description

DebiCheck is an initiative by the Payments Association of South Africa (PASA) to re-architect the way that debit orders are processed. The debit orders are now electronically confirmed by the customer (Debtor) with their bank on a once-off basis, relating to a new contract that they have signed with a company (Creditor). DebiCheck has been implemented by all banks in the industry and our team represents Absa at an industry level as well as servicing all internal channels and product houses. This creates opportunity and exposure to a number of different business areas within the bank. From a technical point of view, our stack is 95% in-house built using open-source technologies. The application has been architected with a micro services approach and implemented as SpringBoot applications deployed into containers which runs within the Rancher platform. The application needs to be performant as we are required to process a very large number of transactions. We employ a DevOps approach to our work which means we support the full lifecycle of our product from development to production. We have a number of upcoming projects that are a mix between technical redesign of some parts of the applications, enhancing existing components as well as replacements of some other legacy applications which DebiCheck will supersede once fully implemented in industry. We also have an ongoing endeavor to move all our application infrastructure to AWS.

Key critical requirements:

• 10+ years of software development experience
• Technical skills required: Java8, SpringBoot, Microservices, Databases (PLSQL), Kubernetes, Rest, MQ, Spring cloud, Camel, Spring batch (optional), Cloud computing principals advantageous
• Strong proficiency with Java Streams / Java Program Construction / Strings, Formatting and Parsing
• Relevant B-Degree in Computer Science preferred but not essential if minimum requirements of experience & practical application are evident
• Experience working in an agile environment
• Excellent communication, analytical skills and decision making ability in collaborative environments
• Excellent understanding of specific coding / scripting languages
• Solid understanding of Object Oriented Design and ability to properly apply general design patterns and paradigms
• Experience with test-driven development and domain driven design
• Solid understanding of messaging protocols and web services like SOAP and REST
• Experience with open-source relational databases
• DebiCheck knowledge advantageous

Key Accountabilities:

• Contribute to and in some cases lead all phases of the development lifecycle including e.g. design process
• Determine operational feasibility of solutions by evaluating analysis, problem definition, business requirements, solution development and proposed solutions
• Develop high quality software / application design and architecture in a test driven & domain driven / cross domain environment
• Quickly produce well-organised, optimized, and documented source code to deliver technical solutions
• Ensure designs & solutions support the technical organisation principles of self-service, repeatability, testability, scalability & resilience
• Apply general design patterns and paradigms to deliver technical solutions
• Create & Maintain Sophisticated CI / CD Pipelines (authoring & supporting CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins / Azure Devops or similar tools and deploy to multi-site environments – supporting and managing your applications all the way to production)
• Use & configure modern observability techniques to provide a deeper understanding of the application.
• Automate tasks through appropriate tools and scripting e.g. Ansible, Kubernetes
• Debug existing source code and polish feature sets.
• Work with guilds and other technical SME’s to improve and evolve technical products and services
• Apply unit testing frameworks and perform integration, validation and verification testing
• Apply version control and related concepts and techniques
• Align all application development & development process to Group Architecture, Security & Infrastructure guidelines
• Work with project & program teams (when required) to plan & manage the development lifecycle e.g. releases, risk management, testing, integration etc.
• Conduct reviews, performance monitoring & ongoing optimization and maintenance on applications
• Stay ahead of the curve on emerging technologies and development practices e.g. scripting languages, containerization etc. (Developing Expertise)
• Contribute to the design & evolution of Group Architecture, Infrastructure & associated technical standards for the organization

People:

• Coach & mentor other engineers
• Conduct peer reviews, testing, problem solving within and across the broader team
• Provide technical subject matter expertise and support in the attraction and recruitment of Product Engineers for the organization
• Participate as a subject matter expert in the development & development planning of the broader product engineering team
• Support the people change teams in the design of adoption processes (Customer, Employee & 3rd Party Adoption)

Competencies required:

• Making Decisions
• Empowering Individuals
• Embracing Change
• Challenging Ideas, impactful and transparent communication at all levels
• Collaborative Team Player
• Take initiative, drive delivery and impact

Education

Bachelor's Degree: Information Technology