Senior Java Engineer

Senior Java Engineer: 6 month contract. Outside IR35, 2 days a week in Manchester. I’m looking for a senior Java Engineer to join a small team working on building a load of new backend services for an existing platform. The role requires someone who can be in office a couple of days a week to collaborate with the small engineering and product team. What you’ll be doing Building event-driven services and integrations on Kafka Deploying and running services on AWS, working closely with DevOps on infrastructure and pipelines Writing clean, tested, production-ready code, and setting the standard through code review Working directly with product and engineering leads to turn requirements into working features fast Required experience: Strong commercial experience in Java (17+) and Spring Boot, ideally Spring Boot 3 Hands-on Kafka experience: producers, consumers, topic design, and handling failure and replay AWS in production, e.g. ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, SQS/SNS RESTful API and microservices design, plus relational databases (PostgreSQL or similar) Solid testing discipline: JUnit, Mockito, integration testing (Testcontainers a plus) CI/CD, Docker, and comfort with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CloudFormation) Previous contract experience, landing quickly and delivering on a new build Hands-on use of AI-assisted development in your daily workflow, such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor or ChatGPT, for scaffolding, refactoring, test generation and reviewing generated code critically Kubernetes, observability tooling (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) As an industry leading, nationwide Marketing, Digital, Analytics, IT and Design recruitment agency, we are continually receiving new assignments to work on, so keep a close eye on our website, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages for a full list of current permanent and interim opportunities as well as marketplace news and fun stuff. Forward Role is operating as an employment agency. WKCL1_UKTJ