Senior Software Engineer - 6 Month Contract Start Date: ASAP Rate: Market rates, outside ir35 Contract Length: 6 months Location: Manchester, hybrid Key Responsibilities Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services using Java, aligning with best practices for performance, reliability, and maintainability. Work with containerisation/orchestration technologies (Kubernetes) to deploy, manage, and scale services. Develop and maintain systems on Cloud Platform, leveraging cloud-native capabilities. Implement and manage message streaming / queuing architectures using Kafka (or similar), ensuring high throughput, resilience, and fault tolerance. Contribute to CI/CD processes: build pipelines, automated testing, code reviews. Collaborate cross-functionally with architects, DevOps/SRE, QA to define technical roadmap, troubleshoot production issues, and ensure observability. Essential Skills & Experience Strong and proven experience in Java, Spring Boot, in enterprise-scale backend systems. Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, deploying microservices in production. Solid working knowledge of Cloud Platforms, including networking, storage, services like GKE, Pub/Sub, etc. In depth experience with Kafka: setting up clusters, producers/consumers, tuning, fault handling. Experience with microservices architecture, REST APIs, and distributed systems. Strong CI/CD and DevOps mindset; experience with automated testing, mo...