Senior Java Engineer

Forward Role · Manchester, Greater Manchester

Senior Java Engineer at Forward Role, based in Manchester, Greater Manchester. This is a contract role.

Salary
Competitive
Location
Manchester, Greater Manchester
Contract
Contract
Posted
23 hours ago
Closes
20 Nov 2026
Sector
IT & Software

Reference 4568465

About the role

Senior Java Engineer: 6 month contract. Outside IR35, 2 days a week in Manchester.

I'm looking for a senior Java Engineer to join a small team working on building a load of new backend services for an existing platform. The role requires someone who can be in office a couple of days a week to collaborate with the small engineering and product team. 

What you’ll be doing

  • Building event-driven services and integrations on Kafka
  • Deploying and running services on AWS, working closely with DevOps on infrastructure and pipelines
  • Writing clean, tested, production-ready code, and setting the standard through code review
  • Working directly with product and engineering leads to turn requirements into working features fast

Required experience:

  • Strong commercial experience in Java (17+) and Spring Boot, ideally Spring Boot 3
  • Hands-on Kafka experience: producers, consumers, topic design, and handling failure and replay
  • AWS in production, e.g. ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, SQS/SNS
  • RESTful API and microservices design, plus relational databases (PostgreSQL or similar)
  • Solid testing discipline: JUnit, Mockito, integration testing (Testcontainers a plus)
  • CI/CD, Docker, and comfort with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CloudFormation)
  • Previous contract experience, landing quickly and delivering on a new build
  • Hands-on use of AI-assisted development in your daily workflow, such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor or ChatGPT, for scaffolding, refactoring, test generation and reviewing generated code critically
  • Kubernetes, observability tooling (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)

As an industry leading, nationwide Marketing, Digital, Analytics, IT and Design recruitment agency, we are continually receiving new assignments to work on, so keep a close eye on our website, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages for a full list of current permanent and interim opportunities as well as marketplace news and fun stuff.
Forward Role is operating as an employment agency.

Reference: 4568465 · Posted 23 hours ago · Closes 20 Nov 2026 · Listed via Forward Role

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