Principal Java Technical Lead

Join the team building a next-generation, real-time, prefunded settlement platform at the heart of South Africa's instant payments ecosystem. The platform authorises and settles instant payments against prefunded participant balances and connects directly with domestic and regional real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, which makes it critical national financial infrastructure.This is a hands-on technical leadership position, not a people management one. You will own technical direction, design quality, and engineering standards for an embedded squad that scales from five to eleven engineers at peak, guiding a thirteen-month programme from mobilisation through to pilot go-live. If you thrive on designing high-throughput, zero-data-loss systems and want your architecture decisions to shape how a nation moves money in real time, this role offers rare scale, visibility, and impact.

Responsibilities

• Own technical design and architectural decisions for the settlement service, working jointly with the partner's engineering leads
• Design the event-driven core, including topic design, idempotency, ordering guarantees, replay strategies, and failure handling
• Engineer the platform to meet demanding non-functional requirements: 1,000 to 1,500 transactions per second at peak, approximately 100ms average latency with sub-second worst case, a recovery time objective measured in seconds, and zero data loss on confirmed transactions
• Define and enforce engineering standards across service design, API contracts, testing, code review, and definition of done
• Lead a mixed squad of backend, platform, and QA engineers through hands-on technical guidance rather than line management
• Pair with the partner's in-house engineers and transfer knowledge so they can operate and evolve the platform independently after go-live
• Collaborate with the DevSecOps stream on CI/CD pipelines, observability, and release governance
• Represent engineering in design authority, risk, and compliance forums, and engage with the partner's security function
• Identify and mitigate technical risks early, ensuring architecture decisions remain aligned with regulatory and resilience requirements

Experience and education

Must-Have

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years leading a delivery team
• Proven delivery experience in payments, banking, or another regulated financial services environment (essential)
• Strong track record designing high-throughput transactional systems such as settlement, clearing, ledger, switching, or core banking platforms
• Deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot within distributed, event-driven architectures
• Solid experience designing API contracts and enforcing engineering quality standards across teams
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent demonstrable experience

Advantageous

• Experience leading engineers embedded within a partner or client organisation
• Exposure to RTGS or instant payment scheme integrations
• Experience presenting to design authority, risk, or compliance governance forums