# Lead Backend Engineer - PayLink

**Company:** [Salla](https://jobs.workable.com/companies/nT3kBaLUjKH8KvFcNsKEtc.md)
**Location:** Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
**Workplace:** hybrid
**Employment type:** Full-time
**Department:** Technology

[Apply for this job](https://jobs.workable.com/view/34d89d22-cd5f-43a8-8d07-5fbd9a5bff22)

## Description

A hands-on engineering lead who sets technical direction, owns code quality, and builds payment-critical backend services on a modern Java stack, while guiding and growing a team of backend engineers.

What you'll do

-   Provide hands-on technical leadership for backend engineering on a modern Java / Spring Boot stack.
-   Design and build payment-critical backend services and APIs.
-   Own code quality: standards, code review, testing and release readiness.
-   Ensure correctness, reliability and security across the services the team owns.
-   Mentor and grow backend engineers, and work closely with architecture and product.

## Requirements

-   8+ years in Java backend with strong Spring Boot.
-   Proven technical leadership while remaining hands-on in the code.
-   Hands-on payments / fintech experience is required — you have worked on real payment or financial-transaction systems.
-   Hands-on experience with at least one payment processor or gateway (e.g. MPGS, Cybersource or mada). This is a requirement for this role.
-   Strong microservices, REST API design, relational databases and automated testing.
-   Delivery on containers (Kubernetes) with CI/CD.
-   AI-augmented engineering — you actively use AI coding tools such as Claude Code in your day-to-day development. This is a requirement for this role.

Nice to have

-   Experience with more than one payment processor / gateway.
-   Cloud platforms (OCI, AWS or Azure); event-driven systems (Kafka).