Senior Software Engineer at Kunai in Dallas, Texas, United States

Job description

• We are building a team of Senior Software Engineers to join a high-impact digital payments modernization program supporting the integration of a major card network into one of the largest financial institutions in the United States. This is a hands-on engineering role at the intersection of legacy and modern infrastructure, where you will contribute to both the reliability of mission-critical payment systems today and help shape the architecture that will power them tomorrow.

Responsibilities

• You will be embedded across one or more workstreams supporting digital payments engineering, with responsibilities that may include:
• Domain & Service Architecture
• Apply domain-driven design to define bounded contexts, domain models, and aggregate boundaries for card-network reference data — establishing a ubiquitous language shared across engineering and business stakeholders.
• Develop and harden a Spring Boot / JPA / PostgreSQL Aurora service with Liquibase-managed schema migrations, a Drools-based business rules engine, and scheduled batch jobs — including designing authorization and data-access controls from the ground up where none exist today.
• Design and own integration workflows and routing using Apache Camel (or equivalent), orchestrating multi-step, stateful operations such as request intake, validation, approval, and publication pipelines.
• Develop an event-driven backbone using Kafka — topic/schema design, producer/consumer reliability patterns, and integration with the rules engine and workflow layer.
• Frontend & Identity
• Develop a micro-frontend application (Next.js/React/TypeScript) as an independently deployable system, and design its convergence path into the card network's future shared micro-frontend shell.
• Own the OAuth2/OIDC identity architecture end-to-end — provider integration (Okta), JWT/token validation strategy, session/revocation design, and trust-boundary decisions across environments.
• Cloud & Platform
• Design and govern AWS IAM policy, S3, and CloudFront architecture across multiple environments — this is not config-following; you're expected to set the standard.
• Lead deployment on the organization's internal static cloud hosting platform.
• Drive test-driven development practice across the team and build out continuous testing/automation pipelines (unit, contract, integration, and end-to-end) as part of CI/CD.
• Scalability, Performance Testing & Validation
• Design and execute enterprise-grade performance testing strategies for payment processing services, defining frameworks, tooling, and success criteria from the ground up.
• Identify performance bottlenecks across legacy and modern service layers and drive measurable improvements through analysis and targeted optimization.
• Instrument and validate services running on Java, Oracle, Tomcat, and WebSphere as well as modern workloads running on PostgreSQL and OpenShift.
• Collaborate with backend engineers to ensure scalability requirements are met across all environments prior to release.
• Translate performance findings into clear recommendations for engineering leads and stakeholders.
• Application Engineering
• Build and maintain full-stack backend services supporting card network integration, working primarily in Java with PostgreSQL and OpenShift Container Platform (OCP).
• Contribute to application modernization efforts, migrating and re-platforming services from legacy infrastructure to cloud-native environments.
• Leverage AI-assisted development tooling (including GitHub Copilot) to improve development velocity and code quality.
• Participate in code reviews, architectural discussions, and cross-team technical planning sessions.
• General Engineering
• PCI data purging pipelines and event-driven architecture patterns including token removal and event consumption.
• Work with event-driven services running on OpenShift and Oracle and PostgreSQL backends to support data lifecycle and compliance requirements.
• Serve as a flexible, senior contributor across teams where engineering depth and experience are needed most.

Requirements

• Core Engineering
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, primarily in Java.
• Strong working knowledge of relational databases — Oracle and/or PostgreSQL required; hands-on experience with PostgreSQL Aurora and Liquibase-managed migrations a strong plus.
• Experience deploying and operating services in containerized environments (OpenShift, Kubernetes, or equivalent).
• Familiarity with legacy enterprise application servers — Tomcat and/or WebSphere experience a plus.
• Experience with Spring Boot/JPA, business rules engines (e.g., Drools), and integration/orchestration frameworks (e.g., Apache Camel).
• Working knowledge of Kafka or similar event-streaming platforms, including topic/schema design and producer/consumer reliability patterns.
• Architecture & Design
• Practical experience applying domain-driven design — bounded contexts, aggregates, and ubiquitous language — in a production system.
• Demonstrated ownership of authorization/data-access control design, not just implementation against an existing model.
• Experience designing and governing cloud IAM, storage, and CDN architecture (AWS IAM, S3, CloudFront or equivalents) at a standards-setting level.
• Frontend & Identity
• Experience with modern frontend frameworks (Next.js/React/TypeScript), including micro-frontend architectures and independently deployable frontend systems.
• Experience owning OAuth2/OIDC identity flows end-to-end, including provider integration (e.g., Okta), token validation, and session/revocation design.
• Performance Engineering
• At least one enterprise-level performance testing engagement — defining strategy, selecting tooling, executing tests, and presenting findings.
• Experience with performance profiling, load testing, and bottleneck resolution in high-throughput, distributed systems.
• Ability to design logical, streamlined test frameworks from scratch and operate with minimal guidance.
• Testing & CI/CD
• Demonstrated experience driving test-driven development practices across a team.
• Experience building continuous testing/automation pipelines (unit, contract, integration, and end-to-end) as part of CI/CD.
• Payments & Financial Services
• Background in digital payments, card processing, or financial services technology strongly preferred.
• Understanding of PCI compliance requirements and secure data handling practices.
• Familiarity with event-driven architecture patterns and OpenShift-based eventing.
• Collaboration & Communication
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively in large, matrixed program environments with multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to translate technical complexity for non-technical audiences.
• Comfortable operating in environments with evolving requirements and ambiguity.
• Bachelor’s Degree, in lieu of a degree, demonstrating in addition to the minimum years of experience required for the role, three years of specialized training and/or progressively responsible work experience in technology for each missing year of college is required
• Experience with PGLogical or PostgreSQL logical replication.
• Exposure to AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot or Claude).
• Prior work on bank or card network integration programs.
• Experience working in segregated or air-gapped development environments.

Skills

Required

• Java
• Spring Boot
• JPA
• PostgreSQL
• Oracle
• Liquibase
• Drools
• Apache Camel
• Kafka
• OpenShift
• Kubernetes
• AWS IAM

Preferred

• PostgreSQL Aurora
• PGLogical
• GitHub Copilot
• Claude
• Tomcat
• WebSphere