Location: Cape Town (Hybrid, in-office 3 days a week Monday through Wednesday)

Reports to: Manager / Director, Engineering

About NYSHEX

NYSHEX is a leading platform in the shipping industry, solving the critical issue of contract fulfillment for carriers, shippers, and NVOCCs. Our mission is to unite these stakeholders through shared digital infrastructure, improving performance and reducing manual workloads.

Job Summary:

The Back End Staff Software Engineer is a senior-level engineering role focused on delivering high-quality, scalable, and secure software products and applications. You will directly impact the company's success by driving technical excellence, fostering collaboration, on-time delivery of projects through designing technical solutions and hands-on development of key product features. In this role, you are expected to demonstrate a strong sense of ownership, foster trust within cross-functional teams, and embody the company's core values through impactful technical contributions and leadership.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership:

Architect, design, and implement complex systems while ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability. Take ownership of technical deliverables, from ideation to production, writing efficient, secure, and testable code. Ensure code quality with an emphasis on achieving 85% or higher test coverage for all new code and improving coverage for existing code.

Make an Impact through Delivery:

Lead by example, ensuring high-quality software delivery that is on time and in full. Create clear technical designs, estimates and partner with the engineering director and team leads on planning feature delivery. Inventory, track and address prioritized tech debt, including vulnerabilities or defects before release. Minimize/prevent software deployments with critical or high defects through design-time impact analysis, test plans and test execution/validation. Ensure observability through instrumentation and alerts for driving continuous improvement of our software products.

Build Trust through Reliable Designs, Estimation and Standards:

Share ownership of your team's delivery by partnering closely with product managers, engineering directors and leads to design, breakdown, estimate, prioritize and plan work effectively. Establish clear acceptance criteria, solution designs, and testing standards for assigned deliverables. Continually explore ways to improve one’s own efficiency and that of teams you work with through shared ownership of metrics and data-driven insights.

System Optimization & Performance:

Optimize system performance and scalability, identifying bottlenecks and driving system improvements. Ensure engineering excellence by maintaining a focus on application and system health, uptime, and observability.

Collaborate on Definition of Ready (DoR):

Actively collaborate with product management, engineering leaders and engineers to ensure that the problem or business need is well understood. Based on this understanding ensure that designs and estimates for key product intent are ready for backlog prioritization well before it lands in a team’s sprint. Help drive the adoption of Definition of Ready (DoR) as a key enabler of successful delivery and engineering excellence.

Discuss Debate and Unite and Challenge Respectfully:

Engage in productive debates on requirements, architecture, and acceptance criteria to ensure clarity and success in delivery. Respectfully challenge product managers, engineering leaders and cross-functional peers, ensuring that requirements and epics are well-refined and ready for solution designing and subsequent implementation. Push for rigorous testing, release strategies, and strong planning to guarantee success.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

• Productivity: Average velocity of 101 Inventory Unit (IU) Points per Sprint

• Code Coverage: 85%+ Code Coverage per Sprint

• Security: Zero Critical Vulnerabilities per Sprint

• Teamwork: 6 PR Reviews per Sprint

• ADR: Contribute to 1 Architectural Decision Record (ADR) per quarter, ensuring alignment with long-term technology and business strategy​.

Tech Stack (Back End Focus)

Languages & Frameworks

• Java (primary) with deep experience in Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, and Spring Data

• Hibernate / JPA for ORM, transaction management, and persistence patterns

• Python for backend services, automation, data processing, or supporting systems

• Strong experience designing and evolving RESTful and event-driven APIs

• Familiarity with JVM performance tuning, memory management, and concurrency

• Architecture & Backend Systems

• Microservices and service-oriented architectures

• Event-driven systems using messaging platforms such as Kafka

• API versioning, backward compatibility, and contract-driven development

• Experience designing systems for scalability, fault tolerance, and high availability

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Strong experience with AWS (e.g., EC2, ECS, EKS, S3, RDS, Aurora)

• Containerization using Docker and orchestration with Kubernetes

• Infrastructure-aware application design (timeouts, retries, backpressure, resilience)

Data & Storage

• Relational databases such as PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora

• Strong understanding of schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, and transactions

• Experience with data migration strategies and backward-compatible schema evolution

• CI/CD & Engineering Tooling

• CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or similar tooling

• Experience with automated backend testing (unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end)

• Familiarity with JIRA-based agile workflows (epics, stories, delivery tracking)

Monitoring, Observability & Reliability

• Backend observability using tools such as DataDog, New Relic, and CloudWatch

• Experience instrumenting services with metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing

• Ability to define and monitor SLIs/SLOs for backend systems

Security & Quality

• Secure coding practices for backend systems

• Experience with SAST/DAST tools such as SonarQube, AWS Inspector, Black Duck or similar

• Familiarity with authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth2, JWT, service-to-service auth)

Required Qualifications:

Experience:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a minimum of 4 years in a senior or staff engineering role. Proven experience with designing and delivering purpose built products and service oriented applications at scale.

Technical Expertise:

• Strong knowledge of web applications, microservices, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native product development. Proficiency with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices.

Collaboration & Leadership:

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills. Proven ability to mentor junior engineers and influence technical decision-making across teams. Able to break high-level initiatives down into tasks for a team to consume.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in building SaaS products, especially with a focus on high performing applications and services.

• Knowledge of security best practices (e.g., OWASP Top 10) and familiarity with modern authentication systems (e.g., OAuth, SAML).