Job Title: Lead Java Engineer
Job Type: Contract
Mode of work: Hybrid
Industry: Tech
Location: Ikeja
Experience: 7 years
Salary: Negotiable
Job Purpose
To set the engineering standard for the Java estate, demonstrate it through a reference implementation, and hold design authority over the External Applications subsystems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role; the post holder will write the reference implementation.
The subsystems in scope include the payment gateway, covering both fee collection and disbursement via the national settlement infrastructure; the USSD gateway; the email gateway service; device registry services with a lifecycle management interface; appointment booking; and a geospatial enrolment planning and coverage analytics module.
Key responsibilities
· Define engineering standards for the Java estate: service template, project structure, configuration externalization pattern, error contract, logging format, testing expectations and dependency policy.
· Implement the packaging and handoff standard in practice — GitLab CI pipeline templates producing container images and parameterized Helm charts, with the pipeline enforcing the standard rather than a document requesting it.
· Build one subsystem end to end to the standard as the reference implementation that other teams work from.
· Hold design authority over the External Applications subsystems through a review gate with a defined pass condition.
· Provide technical direction on the more demanding subsystem designs, including the payment gateway settlement integration and the USSD gateway, which is inbound, synchronous and session-based rather than message-queue driven.
· Establish and enforce the code review standard, including what blocks a merge.
· Develop the Java team, and the two nominated subsystem technical leads to independent capability
Essential experience
· Java and Spring Boot at principal level, with production systems at national or tier-one scale.
· Has set engineering standards across multiple teams and enforced them through tooling and gates.
· Has built for handoff produced packages deployed by another organization, without production access, from supplied documentation. This is the differentiating requirement for this role.
· Kubernetes, Helm and GitOps sufficient to design the packaging contract
· PostgreSQL at scale, and event-driven integration patterns including idempotency and dead-letter handling.
· Has developed engineers into technical leads
Desirable experience
· Payments, particularly national settlement rails.
· Telecommunications channel integration - USSD, SMPP or aggregator platforms.
· Key cloak or OpenID Connect as a consumer.
· MOSIP or a comparable national identity implementation.
Qualified candidates can send their CVs to [email protected] using the job title as the subject of the mail.
September 1, 2026 222
