Data Engineer with Java

Senior Data Engineer

We’re a London-based fintech on a mission to help banks and small businesses thrive in a digital-first economy. Founded in 2017, we bring together the energy and flexibility of a high-growth scale-up with the backing of global financial institutions. Our cloud-based platform powers end-to-end merchant services for banks, combining payments and business banking into one seamless experience. We partner with trusted names like NatWest (Tyl by NatWest), NAB (NAB Hive) and Truist (Truist Merchant Engage) in the United States to help their small business customers grow and succeed.

We’re a close-knit team of designers, engineers, and financial services experts who care deeply about what we build and how we work together. We value curiosity, collaboration, and making things better every day. Whether you’re technical, creative, or commercial, you’ll find space here to do your best work, develop your skills, and be part of something meaningful. We’re headquartered in London and expanding our team in South Africa – and we’d love for you to be part of the journey.

The role

As a Senior Backend Engineer in Data, you will own one or more components of our backend microservice applications. You will join the team that builds and maintains the data ingestion pipelines that turn raw banking and transactional data into actionable insights.

This is a great opportunity to get full exposure to the entire tech stack involved in building data pipelines for ingestion, data persistence and data APIs powering our micro-frontends at scale. We have a fun environment with a high level of responsibility, autonomy, trust and transparency and work very closely with the product development and business teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable ingestion pipelines that work in both streaming and batch modes.
• Integrate with third-party APIs, banks and payment processors to ingest transactional data.
• Write production-quality code in Java 21 (Spring Boot) to develop microservices and data integration endpoints.
• Use reactive frameworks (Spring WebFlux) where needed for asynchronous processing.
• Operate and optimise Kafka-based streaming workflows and event-driven architectures.
• Implement large-scale data processing jobs on Azure Databricks with Spark (Scala/Python) to transform and aggregate data. Optimise Spark jobs for performance and cost efficiency on Azure.
• Design and maintain schemas in MS SQL Server and ensure data models are efficient for queries and analytics.
• Ensure data quality and governance: validation, schema evolution, lineage and monitoring.
• Expose data via APIs and data products consumed by micro-frontends and reporting tools.
• Embed pre-built data science solutions into the data estate.
• Provide Level 3 support for production issues.
• Collaborate closely with product, engineering and business teams to translate requirements into production-ready pipelines.

What we are looking for

• Expert in Java 21+ with Spring and Spring Boot.
• Hands-on experience with messaging and streaming platforms. Apache Kafka (or equivalent) experience is required – our pipelines ingest high-volume events in real time. Knowledge of Azure Event Hubs (Kafka-compatible) is also acceptable.
• Proficient in T-SQL with experience on MS SQL Server.
• Good software design and coding practices. Familiar with unit/integration testing (JUnit, Cucumber), version control (Git), and agile methodologies.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and teamwork. Able to translate complex data requirements into reliable technical solutions.
• Eager to learn new big data and cloud technologies and keep your skills up to date.
• Enthusiastic about finding creative ways to solve problems and curios to explore new areas.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience with big data on Microsoft Azure. Comfortable using Azure Databricks/Spark, and Azure storage (Blob/SQL/Cosmos).
• Exposure to Scala or Python is a plus for Spark jobs.
• Experience with Spring WebFlux (reactive programming) is highly desirable.
• Ability to containerize applications (Docker) and deploy/manage them in Kubernetes clusters.
• Familiar with NoSQL/database technologies; we use Cosmos DB for scalable, multi-region data.
• Experience with Terraform or similar tools to provision cloud resources. Familiar with CI/CD practices (we use GitOps/ArgoCD pipelines).
• Exposure to logging/monitoring stacks (ELK/Elastic, Prometheus/Grafana) and performance testing tools (K6, JMeter).
• Interest or experience in emerging AI/ML tools and LLMs (e.g. Ollama LLM) as the company explores intelligent analytics.

Who we are looking for

• Ideally someone who has worked for a Fintech start-up.
• Starter-finisher attitude to manage work.
• Strong verbal and written English communication skills.
• Comfortable working outside of rigid structures and frameworks.
• Effective working in ambiguous environments.
• You are a team player and can work cross-team - for instance with business-minded staff, designers, product owners, and everything in between.
• Actively mentors and supports others, sharing knowledge, guiding junior engineers, and contributing to a strong engineering culture.
• Builds alignment and influence, fostering trusted relationships and helping teams make better technical and product decisions.

What we stand for

• We believe we are better together when we listen, engage and support each other, we want you to bring your expertise and experience to work every day.
• We are passionate about what we are doing and want you to share this with us, enjoy your time with us, stay calm under pressure and bring positive energy to the team.
• We are all on a journey together, we want your ambition and flexible mind set to embrace the twists and turns as we grow as a business.

Your wellbeing and professional growth is important to us. If you join Pollinate, you can expect:

• Access to career coaching, life coaching and therapy from our employee experience partners Plumm.
• Access to Pluralsight for Engineering roles or a Growth Budget to develop your learning.
• Flexible hybrid working where our hub is used for team or collaboration meetings and company get togethers.

As part of Pollinate, you’ll be working with experts across payments, technology, customer experience, and financial services, supported by a world-class network of partners. Join us to be a key part of a team that’s changing the future of payments, with the freedom to make your mark. Together, we’ll push the boundaries of what’s possible with payment enabled merchant services for SMB’s around the world.

This Job Description covers the main areas of your responsibilities - it is not an exhaustive list.