SDE 1 - Backend Engineer

About this role

About the role: - Join Gokiwi Tech's backend engineering team and work on systems behind the company's core product experience. - The backend consists of Java microservices deployed on Kubernetes, with PostgreSQL, Redis and multiple external partner integrations. - Engineers are expected to write production code from their first week and take ownership of features from development through operation. - This opening is for SDE 1; further role-specific details will be discussed after the application stage. What you'll work on: - Build and maintain Java microservice functionality covering APIs, background jobs, integrations and data models. - Integrate third-party systems while handling signed callbacks, retries, idempotency, reconciliation and unusual status-code behavior. - Design REST APIs used by other services and create the associated database migrations and automated tests. - Investigate production problems using distributed traces, logs, metrics, database information and partner responses, then implement fixes. - Participate in code reviews, on-call rotations and post-incident reviews, with early responsibility for production deployments. What we're looking for: - Candidates should have 1-4 years of professional backend engineering experience, mainly using Java; Java 17+ is preferred. - Strong DSA and problem-solving fundamentals are required, including complexity analysis, data-structure selection and live coding ability. - Hands-on experience with Spring Boot or Spring MVC, REST API design and dependency injection is expected. - Applicants should be comfortable with PostgreSQL or MySQL, including writing queries, understanding indexes and identifying N+1 issues. - Working knowledge of Git, Docker, Linux or shell environments, plus Redis or Memcached, is required. - Strong written communication is expected for clear pull-request descriptions and incident post-mortems. - Core CS knowledge should include OOP, basic concurrency, HTTP, JSON and introductory system design such as URL shorteners or rate limiters. - Daily comfort with AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot is required, including effective prompting, critical review of generated code and maintaining output quality. Good to have: - Useful experience includes third-party vendor integrations involving payments, banks, KYC or notifications; fintech concepts such as UPI, cards, netbanking, BBPS, refunds, chargebacks, reconciliation and PCI-DSS; queues including Kafka, SQS or RabbitMQ; eventual consistency; Kubernetes; AWS services such as EKS, RDS, Secrets Manager and S3; GitHub Actions CI/CD; OpenTelemetry, SigNoz, Grafana and structured logging; webhook or callback processing with idempotency, replay handling, JOSE, JWS, JWE or HMAC; and tools such as Liquibase, Flyway, Hibernate/JPA and MapStruct. - Open-source contributions, competitive-programming profiles on platforms such as Codeforces or LeetCode, or side projects that can be reviewed are also valued. - Bonus credit applies if you have built one service integrating more than three vendors for the same capability, handled a P0 while on-call, or used Go, Python or Kotlin alongside Java. Note: The JD covers both SDE 1 and SDE 2; additional details specific to each level will be discussed after the application stage.