Overview

Senior Backend Java Engineer - Contract (Outside of IR35)

Duration: 3+ Months
Start Date: Beginning of August 2025
Day Rate: £400 – £500 per day
Location: Basingstoke office, 2 days a week is ideal (London option also available)

As a Senior Software Engineer (Java) – Contractor at Pulselive, you’ll play a key role in a major migration project from AWS to Azure, ensuring backend systems, APIs, and cloud services are secure, scalable, and optimised for performance. This position is suited to an experienced backend engineer with strong Java, cloud, and migration expertise who thrives in a collaborative, delivery-focused environment.

You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams to refactor, modularise, and migrate services, ensuring smooth integration across both AWS and Azure platforms.

Responsibilities

• Design, refactor, and migrate scalable backend systems and APIs (Java, Spring Boot) into both AWS to Azure.
• Support migration of identity, secrets management, and key vault solutions ensuring compliance and security.
• Re-architect and modularize services to improve maintainability and performance.
• Integrate with third-party data providers (sports data, video, commentary).
• Build and maintain RESTful APIs for web and mobile applications.
• Deliver infrastructure changes via Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Bicep).
• Manage deployments using CI/CD pipelines (Bitbucket Pipelines, Azure DevOps, ArgoCD).
• Monitor and optimise services using CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Prometheus/Grafana.
• Ensure cloud networking, storage, and compute resources are right-sized and cost-optimised.
• Participate in sprint planning, code reviews, and technical discussions to drive best practices.
• Produce clear technical documentation for backend components, APIs, and migration processes.

Core Skills & Experience

Essential:

• Strong Java 11+ and Spring Boot (v5+) development expertise.
• Proven experience with AWS → Azure migration projects is essential.
• Security and compliance focus, including IAM, secrets management, key vaults.
• API design, integration, and best practices.
• Kubernetes: EKS (AWS) and AKS (Azure).
• AWS Storage (S3, DynamoDB, RDS) and Azure Storage (Blob, Table, Files), Cosmos DB, and Azure SQL.
• Networking: VPC (AWS), VNet (Azure), Application Gateway, API Gateway / API Management.
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Bicep.
• CI/CD automation with Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Pipelines, ArgoCD.

Desirable:

• Cost optimisation and cloud efficiency improvements.
• Strong testing and QA knowledge (automation, regression, performance testing during refactors).
• Kafka or similar event-driven platforms.
• Docker containerisation.
• SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Azure SQL).