Job Title: Senior Full Stack Engineer (Backend-leaning) with EMR Spark

Location: Hybrid – Chicago, IL (3 days onsite/week)

Type: 6-12 month contract

About the Role

We’re seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer with a strong backend focus to join our growing engineering team. In this role, you'll design and build scalable payment systems that power critical transaction processing, fraud detection, reconciliation, and reporting for a leading financial services platform.

You will work in a hybrid cloud-native environment utilizing Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kafka, AWS, Amazon EMR, Apache Spark, React, and TypeScript to deliver high-impact solutions across our platform. The ideal candidate is an experienced engineer with deep domain experience in payment systems and financial technologies, and a passion for solving complex data-driven problems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain backend microservices using Java, Kotlin, and Spring Boot

• Build and manage data-intensive applications using Kafka, Amazon EMR, and Apache Spark

• Collaborate with front-end developers to integrate UI components built with React and TypeScript

• Architect and implement scalable payment workflows, including fraud detection, transaction processing, reconciliation, and reporting

• Optimize performance and reliability across distributed systems and streaming data pipelines

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, data, and DevOps teams to ensure system integrity and seamless deployments

• Implement and uphold secure coding practices and compliance standards relevant to financial software

• Participate in code reviews, technical design discussions, and mentor junior engineers

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a backend emphasis

• Strong proficiency in Java, Spring Boot, and Kotlin

• Proven experience with Kafka, microservices architecture, and AWS

• Hands-on experience with Amazon EMR and Apache Spark for large-scale data processing

• Solid understanding of payment systems, including fraud detection, transaction management, processing, reconciliation, reporting, and workflow design

• Frontend development experience using React and TypeScript

• Background working at a financial institution, ideally a credit card provider

• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing systems compliant with PCI DSS and other financial security standards

• Knowledge of real-time analytics or machine learning integrations for fraud detection

• Familiarity with observability tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or ELK stack

• Prior experience in high-throughput, low-latency systems for financial applications