Senior Backend Engineer

Who are Benifex? 💚💜

We are a fast-moving technology company, and one of the most successful providers of online reward and benefits solutions in the world. We believe that everyone deserves an exceptional experience at work, every day, and build workplace technology that makes this happen. Benifex’s mission is to build remarkable experiences that employees love. Today Benifex supports more than five million employees in over 3,000 organisations across more than 100 countries. To help us on our quest to be the best, we need brilliant people on board and that’s where you come in. 🚀

Role Overview 🚀

Join our Transformers team, responsible for the services that power the creation and delivery of customised reporting for customers across our platform. Every day, customers rely on these services to turn complex data into meaningful insights without needing technical expertise.

We're looking for an engineer with strong opinions on software design who can explain the reasoning behind their decisions. You'll enjoy discussing architecture, working closely with stakeholders and helping shape how systems evolve, while remaining open to challenge and new ideas.

Working in a small, collaborative team, you'll contribute across the full software lifecycle, from shaping product decisions and architecture through to delivery, operation and continuous improvement. You'll work closely with fellow engineers, product leadership and stakeholders, helping to build scalable, maintainable solutions that support an ever-growing volume of customer reporting requirements.

Responsibilities 🤘

• Design, build and maintain scalable backend services using Java, Spring Boot and modern cloud technologies.
• Contribute to the full software development lifecycle, from discovery and design through to deployment and support.
• Work directly with product managers, engineers and stakeholders to shape solutions and deliver customer value.
• Participate in architectural discussions and drive continuous improvement across the codebase.
• Collaborate through pair and mob programming where appropriate to share knowledge and solve complex problems.
• Review and validate AI-generated code, ensuring quality, maintainability and adherence to engineering standards.
• Help evolve our reporting platform to support growing customer demand and increasing scale.
• Take ownership of both strategic engineering initiatives and day-to-day operational responsibilities.

What are we looking for? 🔎

• Strong commercial experience building backend applications with Java and Spring Boot.
• Comfortable owning work from design through to delivery and production support.
• A collaborative engineer who enjoys working closely with product managers, designers and fellow engineers.
• Able to explain and justify technical decisions through clear reasoning rather than personal preference.
• Someone who values simple, maintainable solutions over unnecessary complexity.
• Able to make sound technical decisions and communicate the reasoning behind them.
• Comfortable reviewing, validating and improving AI-assisted code contributions.
• Curious, pragmatic and continuously looking for ways to improve products, processes and engineering practices.
• Interested in helping shape technical direction rather than simply implementing requirements.

Bonus points for:

• Experience with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and applying its principles in production environments.
• Experience with Hibernate, MySQL and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of messaging technologies and event-driven systems such as NATS.
• Experience with observability tooling such as OpenTelemetry and Grafana.
• Experience working in product-focused, cross-functional teams.
• Experience leveraging AI tools to accelerate software delivery whilst maintaining high engineering standards.

Great benefits

🧠 ITP1 pension.

❤️ Lifeplan - a leading financial advisory service that offers personalized advice for maximizing your pension savings.

📝 Collective agreement.

💸 Access to our comprehensive benefits portal.

🤸 Generous wellness allowance.

✈️ 30 vacation days / year.

💰 Referral bonuses.

🌟 Enhanced parental pay.

🙂 Volunteer Days – two paid days annually to give back to the community.

Why should you apply? 🌟

• Impact: work on a product suite used by millions of people that improves employee experience and wellbeing.
• Scale: a big focus of our engineering teams is building features and services to support our customers globally.
• Autonomy: have an input into the product roadmap and technically lead features/services.
• Development: this is a crucial part of our aim to ensure a seamless experience across FPS.
• Top 10 Employer, Sunday Times Best Places to Work Awards
• Work for a profitable, fast-growing market leader in the online reward and benefits space

Our Interview Process ✌

Benifex understand the need to have a fast and efficient process, the below will all be completed in the shortest time possible, typically a 2-2.5 week timeframe.

📞 Initial informal call with the Talent team

⏳ Interview with our Engineering Manager 30-45 min

🔎 Technical Interview - 60 min

🤩 Final interview with VP of Engineering - 30-45 min

How We Work 💡

We prefer visual communication when describing problems and solutions, and don't mind an analogue session by the whiteboard together with our customers and managers. The idea is to have the developers, stakeholders and customers work in direct contact with each other, without any middle layer. As developers, when faced with a new feature or something that requires more than one pair of eyes, we prefer to do pair or mob programming. We've found that this is the most efficient way to communicate design and ideas among team members. This does not mean that every day is pair or mob programming, but when there is a need for it, we don't hesitate.

We actively use AI-assisted development but favour small, reviewable iterations over large generated changes. AI helps us move faster, but engineering judgment remains essential.

We are a proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme.

If you require any reasonable adjustments at any stage during the recruitment process, please let us know with your application.