Senior Backend Engineer (Java/Spring)

About the role

Senior Backend Engineer (Java/Spring) - Engine by Gen

About the Role

Engine by Gen partners with leading financial institutions to surface the richest, most comprehensive set of personalized financial product offers to consumers. We're looking for an experienced backend engineer with strong judgment and a thoughtful critical perspective to help build the services behind our financial products marketplace.

This role isn't about producing baseline code quickly, modern AI tools can do that. It's about collaboration, setting direction, making sound decisions, and driving technical quality. You'll use AI agents as force multipliers while holding a high bar for correctness, maintainability, testability, and operational excellence.

What You'll Do

• Own quality - design reviews, code review, test strategy, and production readiness.
• Architect for change - design and build backend systems that are intentionally small, composable, and resilient to evolving product requirements.
• Design clean contracts - dependable REST APIs, events, and service boundaries that support partner integrations and downstream systems.
• Strengthen the system - improve performance, reliability, and observability, and catch the subtle issues that are easy to miss in fast-moving, AI-assisted development.
• Collaborate cross-functionally - partner with product, data, and fellow engineers to shape solutions, clarify tradeoffs, and deliver reliably.
• Lead AI-assisted development - use AI agents for prototyping, scaffolding, and refactoring, then harden the result and validate it through tests, reasoning, and edge-case review.
• Raise quality through testing - unit, integration/contract, and end-to-end coverage with fast CI feedback loops.

What You'll Bring

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years building and shipping production software, with deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot.
• Strong REST API design skills - service contracts, versioning, and backward compatibility.
• Experience designing and evolving distributed systems, including service decomposition and inter-service communication.
• Solid data modeling and persistence across SQL and NoSQL, including indexing and query performance.
• Experience with event-driven architecture (Kafka, SQS, or similar), including event design and reliability considerations.
• Strong observability instincts - logging, metrics, tracing, and debugging production systems.
• Testing across unit, integration, and contract layers, plus CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS.
• Ability to articulate complex technical tradeoffs to stakeholders and translate product vision into high-fidelity technical direction.
• Hands-on experience with Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent AI-augmented IDEs - with sound discernment about where AI is strong, where it falls short, and how to avoid shipping "AI-shaped" code.

Stack: Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, AWS, DataDog

What's Next

• Recruiter Interview
• Take Home Assessment
• Technical Interview
• Hiring Manager Interview
• Culture Fit Interview

Location: New York, NY (Onsite 3 days per week)

Pay and benefits

The annual base salary for this position is expected to be between $168k - 190k. Base salary is one component of Gen's total compensation package, which includes 401(k) match, health insurance options, disability coverage, life insurance, and unlimited paid time off. Actual salaries will vary based on a candidate's qualifications, experience, skills, and competencies related to the role.

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