Lead UPF Application Developer

Role Overview

We are looking for a Lead UPF Application Developer to join Absa’s Switch Payments Engineering team, supporting our purpose of empowering Africa through secure, reliable, and innovative payment solutions.

This role is critical to designing, developing, implementing, and supporting Universal Payment Framework (UPF) applications in a high-availability, mission-critical environment.

The ideal candidate has 5+ years’ experience in payments, with strong expertise in BASE
24-EPS, UPF, ISO messaging standards, and platforms such as ACI BASE
24, Postilion, and Tandem Non Stop.

They should be skilled in Java, C#, C/C++, and ACI scripting, with experience in enterprise databases, API‑led development, and cloud‑based solutions.

Exposure to AI/ML in payments is advantageous, and COBOL knowledge is a plus.

A strong architectural mindset and alignment with Absa’s values, Trust, Resourcefulness, Stewardship, Inclusion, and Courage are essential.

• Design, develop, test, and deploy UPF-based application components across BASE
  24 EPS and BASE
  24 Classic environments.
• Maintain and enhance existing payment application logic, ensuring compliance with scheme requirements and internal SLAs.
• Perform code reviews, enforce coding standards, and best practices within the UPF development lifecycle.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production incidents, defects, and performance issues in a timely manner.

• Implement and maintain ISO 8583 message parsing, formatting, and routing logic for card authorisation, clearing, and settlement flows.
• Ensure alignment with ISO 20022 migration strategies where applicable within the payments stack.
• Manage field mappings, bitmap configurations, and message type identifiers (MTIs) across multiple host interfaces.
• Collaborate with scheme bodies and acquirer/issuer teams on message specification changes and enhancements.

• Develop and maintain IDF (Item Data File) tables, screen sets, and authorisation host interfaces within BASE
  24 Classic.
• Design and implement transaction processing logic within BASE
  24 EPS, leveraging its event‑driven architecture.
• Configure and manage ATM, POS, and switching modules to support card‑present and card‑not‑present transaction flows.

• Design and develop RESTful and event‑driven APIs to expose payment capabilities and integrate UPF components with downstream and upstream systems.
• Apply API‑led connectivity principles (Experience, Process, and System API layers) to ensure modular, reusable, and well‑governed integration architecture.
• Build, deploy, and manage payment microservices and containerised workloads on cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure.
• Leverage cloud‑native services (managed queues, API gateways, serverless functions, and managed databases) to enhance system scalability and resilience.
• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines for cloud‑hosted payment applications, ensuring rapid, reliable delivery of changes to production.
• Collaborate with security and infrastructure teams to ensure cloud deployments meet PCI‑DSS and financial regulatory compliance requirements.

• Participate actively in Agile ceremonies, sprint planning, and technical design sessions.
• Contribute to solution architecture discussions, producing or reviewing architecture artefacts, integration designs, and non‑functional requirement definitions that span the full payments stack.
• Apply an architecture‑driven mindset to every significant development task, considering component boundaries, data flows, scalability, and the downstream impact of design decisions.
• Produce and maintain technical documentation, including design specifications, architecture decision records (ADRs), runbooks, and change records.
• Mentor junior developers and provide guidance on payments domain knowledge, architectural thinking, and platform‑specific development practices.
• Engage with solution analysts, product managers, and QA engineers to deliver features that meet regulatory and commercial requirements.