Senior Backend Engineer (Java/Spring)

Gen Digital Inc.•New York, NY

3d•$168,000 - $190,000•Onsite

About The Position

Engine by Gen is seeking an experienced backend engineer to build services for its financial products marketplace, which partners with financial institutions to surface personalized financial product offers to consumers. The role emphasizes collaboration, technical direction, sound engineering judgment, and high standards for correctness, maintainability, testability, and operational excellence, including thoughtful use of AI agents. The engineer will design and build small, composable, resilient backend systems; establish dependable REST APIs, events, and service boundaries; strengthen system performance, reliability, and observability; and help shape solutions with product, data, and engineering partners. The role also includes leading AI-assisted development, validating AI-generated work, and improving testing practices and CI feedback loops.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
At least 5 years of experience building and shipping production software, with deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot.
Strong REST API design skills, including service contracts, versioning, and backward compatibility.
Experience designing and evolving distributed systems, including service decomposition and inter-service communication.
Solid data modeling and persistence experience across SQL and NoSQL, including indexing and query performance.
Experience with event-driven architecture such as Kafka or SQS, including event design and reliability considerations.
Strong observability skills, including logging, metrics, tracing, and debugging production systems.
Experience with unit, integration, and contract testing, as well as CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS.
Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs to stakeholders and translate product vision into high-fidelity technical direction.
Hands-on experience with Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent AI-augmented IDEs, and judgment about AI's strengths, limitations, and risks.

Responsibilities

Own quality through design reviews, code reviews, test strategy, and production readiness.
Design and build small, composable, resilient backend systems that can evolve with product requirements.
Create dependable REST APIs, events, and service boundaries for partner integrations and downstream systems.
Improve system performance, reliability, and observability, and identify subtle issues in fast-moving, AI-assisted development.
Collaborate with product, data, and engineering colleagues to shape solutions, clarify tradeoffs, and deliver reliably.
Use AI agents for prototyping, scaffolding, and refactoring, then harden and validate results through testing, reasoning, and edge-case review.
Raise quality through unit, integration/contract, and end-to-end testing, supported by fast CI feedback loops.