Backend Lead (Java/Kotlin)

About the role

Salmon is launching a brand‑new Premium Banking product in Southeast Asia. As the Backend Lead, you will define the technical foundation of a greenfield banking platform and later build and guide the engineering team that brings it to production.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement the core architecture for the new banking domain, making foundational decisions on infrastructure, CI/CD, and release processes.
• Write production‑grade Java and Kotlin code during the initial solo phase (months 1‑6).
• Assess and evolve the infrastructure stack, including AWS services and Terraform provisioning.
• Define testing strategies and ensure robust quality assurance practices.
• From month 6 onward, recruit, mentor, and lead a mixed‑discipline team of Kotlin developers, system analysts, and QA engineers.
• Conduct code and design reviews, fostering distributed‑systems thinking across the team.

Required profile

• Strong commercial experience with Java and deep JVM knowledge.
• Proven ability to work independently on architecture, infrastructure, and release processes.
• At least one year of architectural or technical leadership, either formal or de‑facto.
• Comfort designing and scaling distributed systems in production.

Required skills

• Java
• Kotlin
• JVM ecosystem
• PostgreSQL
• AWS
• Terraform
• CI/CD pipelines
• Distributed systems design