Senior Java Team Lead (Payments)

Job Title: Senior Java Team Lead (Payments)
Company: VCG Tech Limited
Location: Remote (Global)
Employment Type: Full-Time

Role Purpose

You will lead the team that builds and runs our payments platform, the systems that move client money in and out of an online trading business. This covers deposit and withdrawal orchestration, integration with multiple third-party payment service providers, payout flows, and reconciliation. This is money-movement software, so correctness, idempotency, traceability and reliability are the standard, not aspirations. You own the architecture, the technical direction and the delivery accountability for a domain where a single mishandled transaction is a real problem for a real client.

This is a hands-on, coding team lead role. You will spend meaningful time in a Java and Spring Boot microservices codebase, with enough React and TypeScript to lead a fullstack team across the payment journeys clients and operations staff actually use. Day to day you balance writing and reviewing code, shaping the architecture, and growing the engineers around you, working closely with product, operations and other engineering teams to ship reliable payment flows. The team works remotely and you report to the CTO.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture and money-movement correctness

• Own the architecture of deposit, withdrawal, payout and reconciliation services across a Java microservices backend
• Design transaction flows that are idempotent, auditable and safe under retries, timeouts and partial failures
• Define how state transitions, ledgering and reconciliation guarantee that money is never lost, duplicated or stranded
• Set the standards for data consistency, event-driven messaging and failure handling across the team
• Drive technical decisions on resilience, observability and recovery for critical payment paths

Hands-on delivery

• Write, review and merge production code in Java and Spring Boot, leading by example on quality
• Build and maintain REST APIs and event-driven integrations between payment services
• Contribute to the React and TypeScript front end for client and operations payment journeys
• Keep CI/CD, automated testing and deployment pipelines healthy and fast
• Tackle the hardest or highest-risk parts of the work yourself when it matters most

Provider integration and reliability

• Lead integration with multiple third-party payment service providers behind a clean internal abstraction
• Design provider routing, fallback and retry behaviour that stays correct when a provider degrades or fails
• Build reconciliation between internal records and provider settlements to detect and resolve discrepancies
• Own monitoring, alerting and on-call readiness for payment flows using observability tooling
• Lead incident response for payment issues and turn root causes into lasting fixes

Team leadership and delivery

• Lead, mentor and grow a team of backend and fullstack engineers
• Own planning, prioritisation and delivery commitments for the payments roadmap
• Run pragmatic code review, design review and engineering practices that keep quality high
• Partner with product, operations and other teams to translate needs into reliable delivery
• Be accountable for the team's output, timelines and the operational health of what you ship

Required Experience & Skills

• Proven team-management experience is essential - you have directly led a team of engineers as their team lead, owning day-to-day coordination, planning, 1:1s, mentoring, performance and growth, and the team's delivery, while remaining hands-on with code
• 8+ years building backend systems in Java, with deep Spring Boot and microservices experience
• Strong track record building systems where correctness and reliability are critical, ideally involving money movement, transactions or other high-integrity data
• Practical mastery of idempotency, retries, distributed transactions and failure handling in distributed systems
• Strong SQL and relational database skills, including data modelling for transactional and reconciliation workloads
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures and message queues
• Experience designing and operating REST APIs and integrating with third-party providers at scale
• Working proficiency in React and TypeScript, enough to lead a fullstack team and contribute to the front end
• Solid experience running services on AWS with Docker, CI/CD and Git-based workflows
• Clear communicator who can drive technical decisions and align engineering with product and operations

Nice to Have

• Experience in payments, payment orchestration or integrating multiple payment service providers
• Background in reconciliation, ledgering or settlement systems
• Experience in fintech, brokerage or online trading domains
• Familiarity with KYC/AML and fraud-prevention concepts at a generic level
• Kubernetes experience for deploying and operating microservices
• Infrastructure-as-code experience, for example Terraform
• Hands-on experience with observability tooling such as Grafana, Prometheus or CloudWatch
• Comfortable working in a remote, product-team-oriented engineering organisation