Java Engineer - Platform; Pipeline

Electrum is a next-generation payment software technology company.

Electrum is the leading payments software company enabling banks and retailers to power their payments and value-added services. Since 2012, we have established ourselves as a respected software partner through our deep expertise and track record in delivering trusted cloud-native payments solutions. Our systems process billions of high-volume, low-value transactions annually - the kind of payments millions of South Africans make every day without thinking about them.

When our software is slow or down, people can't buy electricity or send money, so we take reliability seriously. See more about us here!

When you join the Electrum team, you’ll get to:

• Be part of the whole journey - from the first idea to a product running in production.
• Grow your skills through formal training and hands-on learning every day.
• Get mentorship from experienced engineers & leaders who are invested in your growth.
• Work in a collaborative, autonomous environment where good ideas can come from anyone.
• Tackle real client problems and see the impact of your work first‑hand.
• Build a Fin Tech career on software that moves real money at scale.

We're looking for Java engineers who are interested in making the move into platform engineering. You'll join our Platforms team from day one.

Note:

You don't need platform experience - we'll teach you, and you'll be working alongside engineers who've been through the same learning curve. And if you give it a proper go and find it isn't for you, there's a route back into backend engineering. We'd rather you try it and tell us than stay in a role that doesn't suit you.

Platforms builds the tooling every other team uses to build, release and run their software - Kubernetes clusters on AWS, Helm charts, Git Ops deployments with ArgoCD, CI pipelines in Git Hub Actions, and our own internal tooling to optimise development and deployment. The goal is to make the golden path of building, deploying and running our software the easiest one.

This is the layer underneath everything. Millions of South Africans use services that run on our platform every day, and none of them care that we're upgrading a cluster - payments don't get a maintenance window. Keeping that running means understanding how it all actually works: what happens between a git push and a pod serving live traffic, how a request moves through the service mesh, and what breaks when a node disappears mid-transaction.

Over the next year, that includes work like:

• Upgrading our clusters and networking stack during business hours using blue/green node groups, moving live traffic across gradually without dropping a payment.
• Building a control plane that knows which version of every component is running in every environment, and flags what's falling behind.
• Stopping configuration drift, so an environment that's been running for years behaves the same as one we deployed last week.

Although there's still manual work today, our approach is to automate what we can, get rid of what we can't, and spend our time building the stack rather than closing tickets.

Why Java engineers? Most of what runs on our platform is Java. We don't write most of those services, but we need to understand deeply how they run - why a pod gets OOM-killed when the heap looks fine, how garbage collection copes with container memory limits, or why one service's latency spikes whenever another one scales. People who've built and debugged Java services already know where to start looking, and what product teams actually need from a platform.

From there, you'll go deeper: how software really behaves at scale in the cloud, from the JVM down through the container runtime, the network and the node. Then…