Java Developer

Title: Senior Software Architect,

Required experience: 8+ yrs. Multiple projects on different stacks.

- Proven experience with full development life cycle for large-scale software products

- Clear communication, decision-making, understanding and explaining trade-offs

- Engineering best practices - code quality, testability, security, release management

- Good knowledge of performance, scalability, software architecture, networking

- Capacity to think in abstract and also obsess about details

- Experience designing microservices architecture

- Strong bent on engineering culture and focused on improving the developer experience

- Self-managed and motivated

- Capacity to break complex problems and work on abstract problems

Job Summary:

Senior Java developer will be responsible for many duties throughout the development lifecycle of applications, from concept and design right through to testing. 

Duties/Responsibilities: 

• To support and maintain existing Java code base, debug the application 
• To analyse user and business requirements and design and implement appropriate solutions 
• To design and code programs following in-house standards and good design principles 
• To ensure that all programs are documented to the company standards 
• To create unit test plans and perform unit testing of the programs
• To provide advice and guidance to other members of the team

Required Skills/Abilities:  

• Hands on experience in designing and developing applications using Java EE platforms 
• Object Oriented analysis and design using common design patterns 
• Good knowledge of Relational Databases, SQL and ORM technologies (JPA2, Hibernate) 
• Experience in the Spring Framework 
• Experience in developing web applications using at least one popular web framework (JSF, Wicket, GWT, Spring MVC) 
• Experience in RESTFul webservices
• Experience with test-driven development 
• Exposure to portal/mobility development - Desired
• Exposure to any of middleware solutions like MQ, Oracle fusion middleware(WebLogic), WebSphere, Open Source

About Sun King

Sun King is the world’s leading off-grid solar energy company, providing affordable solar solutions to the 1.8 billion people without reliable access to electricity. By combining product design, fintech, and field operations, Sun King has connected over 20 million homes to solar power across Africa and Asia, adding more than 200,000 new homes each month. Through ‘pay-as-you-go’ financing, customers make small payments to eventually own their solar systems, saving money and reducing reliance on harmful energy sources like kerosene.

Sun King employs 2,800 staff across 12 countries, with expertise in product design, data science, logistics, customer service, and more. The company is expanding its product range to include clean cooking, electric mobility, and entertainment solutions, all while supporting a diverse workforce — with women making up 44% of the team.

About the role

The Senior Software Developer - Backend will work as part of the Digitization and Automation team to support Sun King design, develop, and implement intelligent, tech-enabled solutions to help solve a large variety of our business problems. We are looking for candidates with an affinity for technology and automations, curiosity towards advancement in products, and strong coding skills for our in-house software development team.

What you will be expected to do:

• Design and build applications/systems based on wireframes and product requirements documents.
• Design and develop coherent and physical data models to meet application requirements. 
• Identify and correct bottlenecks/bugs according to operational requirements.
• Focus on scalability, performance, service robustness, and cost trade-offs.
• Create prototypes and proof-of-concepts for iterative development.
• Take complete ownership of projects (end to end) and their development cycle.
• Mentoring and guiding team members.
• Unit test code for robustness, including edge cases, usability, and general reliability.
• Integrate existing tools and business systems (in-house tools or business tools like ticketing software and communication tools) with external services.
• Coordinate with Product Manager, development team, & business analysts.

You might be a strong candidate if you have/are:

• A minimum of 4 years of experience.
• Deep knowledge of OOPS concepts and programming skills in Core Java, Spring Framework.
• Experience in web service development and integration (SOAP, REST, JSON, XML).
• Should be very strong in problem solving, data structures, and algorithms.
• Strong experience in SQL.
• Experience in the AWS suite (Ec2, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway).
• Experience in scripting languages like Python.
• Experience in Microservice Architecture.
• Prior managing/mentoring experience.
• Knowledge of best software engineering practices for all stages of the software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, testing, and deployment. 

Good to have:

• Knowledge on messaging systems RabbitMQ, Kafka.
• Container-based application deployment (Docker or equivalent)
• Willing to learn new technologies and implement them in products.

What Sun King offers:

• Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry.
• An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet.
• A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
• Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun King Center for Leadership.

WHO YOU ARE

To be successful in this role, you’ll need to have the following skills:

·         Love for coding: A fanatic about writing beautiful and scalable code.

·         A sense of analytics: Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills. Should be resourceful, innovative and inventive.

·         Dynamic: Should be comfortable in dealing with lots of moving pieces. Have exquisite attention to detail, and are comfortable learning new technologies and systems. 

·         Team player: Knack for influencing without being authoritative. Pitch in wherever the team needs help, from writing blog posts to supporting customers.

·         Accountability: High sense of ownership for your code and relentlessness to deliver projects with high business impact. 

KEY QUALIFICATIONS

·         BE/BTech in Computer Science or related field. 

·         5+ years of professional production and development experience with leading-edge server and database technologies (e.g., Python, Java, Node.js, Scala, Spring Boot, MySQL, and NoSQL databases).

KEY SKILLS

·         Strong computer system analysis and design skills in current methodologies and patterns Experience with professional production cloud (AWS preferred).

·         Experience with RESTful Services and APIs.

• Experience in Web and Mobile Applications
• Agility and ability to adapt quickly to changing requirements and scope and priorities
• Experience in Java, Python.
• Deep understanding of data structures and microservices.
• Knowledge of Node.js
• Understanding the nature of asynchronous programming and its quirks and workarounds
• Familiarity with front-end technologies
• User authentication and authorization between multiple systems, servers, and environments
• Interaction with multiple data sources
• Good understanding of SQL
• Understanding fundamental design principles behind a scalable application
• Understanding differences between multiple delivery platforms, such as mobile vs. desktop, and optimizing output to match the specific platform.
• Implementing automated testing platforms and unit tests
• Proficient understanding of code versioning tools, such as Git .

We are looking for Senior Backend Engineers to design and build the systems that power our core business of lending and loan processing.  As a Senior Backend Engineer you will be expected to contribute significantly to your team. Your work is consistently of high quality. You solve complex problems, applying appropriate technologies, design patterns, and best practices. Your focus is on a major portion of existing or new team software. You work with your team to design and build software that is secure, correct, observable, and resilient. Your solutions are pragmatic. You identify the proper level of complexity for a task and advise your peers and manager on technical approach.

What you’ll do

• Design, implement, and maintain developer-friendly APIs and services

• Contribute to code and architecture reviews to keep our code quality high
• Debug and resolve production issues; take part in blameless postmortems
• Plan and execute smooth migrations to new technology as a way of managing technical debt
• Build tools and automation for our business and operations teams
• Make decisions on trade offs such as: Reuse versus introducing dependencies; Extensibility versus over-engineering; and Maintainability versus time to delivery (via short-term workarounds)
• Contribute to the improvement of your team’s code review standards, design discussions, team planning, and AARs.

You may shine in this role if you

• Have a track record of shipping software in a distributed systems environment

• Are enthusiastic about collaborating across departments to solve challenging problems
• Are pragmatic about the need to release less-than-perfect software and continuously iterate on it
• Can identify and articulate trade-offs in software and data design
• Can communicate both technical and business requirements fluently
• Are excited about both learning new things and teaching others

We speak mainly in javascript and golang, though we are open to engineers with different backgrounds and languages