Staff Software Engineer (Java)

Are you interested in joining of Europe's fastest growing companies? Do you want to impact the wellbeing of millions of users?

Are you ready to define the future of backend engineering at one of Europe's fastest-growing companies?

If yes, keep reading and join us to make an impact in a fast-paced and dynamic environment where you'll play a key role in boosting everyday wellbeing, at home, at work. Everywhere!

Epassi's purpose is to boost everyday well-being. We are a leading provider of employee benefit solutions across Europe, established in Finland in 2007. We were the first company to launch a mobile-payable employee benefit payment solution in Europe, and have been recognised by the Financial Times as one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe on multiple occasions. We are an AI-native engineering organisation — we build with AI tools, we iterate with AI tools, and we expect our engineers to embrace this as a core part of how great software gets made.

We are hiring a Staff Engineer (Java) to based in either Finland, Germany, Spain, UK, Netherlands, Poland or Sweden. The preferred location is Finland or Germany.

Your Mission at Epassi

You will be the technical anchor for our backend engineering organisation, operating at the intersection of deep hands-on engineering and broad technical leadership. We are adding this role to define the long-term architecture of our Java Spring Boot services, drive alignment on backend engineering standards across teams, and mentor senior engineers. You will shape how we design, build, operate, and continuously improve our backend systems across the entire Epassi group.

Your Responsibilities

• Define and own the long-term backend architecture strategy across the Epassi group, ensuring decisions are well-reasoned, documented, and understood by all engineering stakeholders

• Set and evolve engineering standards, patterns, and best practices for Java Spring Boot development that multiple teams can build confidently upon

• Lead cross-team technical initiatives from inception through delivery, driving alignment and resolving ambiguity across engineering, product, and design

• Act as a force multiplier by coaching and mentoring Senior and Mid-level engineers — through code review, design feedback, and direct technical guidance

• Partner with Product, Design, Frontend, and DevOps leadership to shape the technical roadmap and represent backend engineering in strategic conversations

• Identify and drive resolution of systemic technical risks, performance bottlenecks, security gaps, and reliability issues before they become production problems

• Champion observability, operational excellence, and a 'you build it, you run it' culture across the backend engineering organisation

• Prototype and validate new architectural approaches, setting the direction for how the team evolves its tooling, service design, and practices over time

What You Should Bring

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 5 years building and operating production backend services with Java and Spring Boot.

• Java & Spring Boot (expert): Deep, production-proven expertise in Java (17+) and Spring Boot, including advanced patterns such as reactive programming, custom auto-configuration, Spring Security, and performance tuning

• Microservice architecture: Demonstrated experience designing and owning scalable microservice architectures — service decomposition, inter-service communication (REST, GraphQL, messaging), shared libraries, and codebase structuring

• Data persistence: Expert-level knowledge of JPA/Hibernate, relational database design, query optimisation, and caching strategies (e.g. Redis); experience with both greenfield and legacy data models

• API design: Strong command of RESTful API design principles and best practices; experience with GraphQL is a plus

• Testing & quality: Strong command of testing at all levels — unit, integration, and end-to-end — and experience setting testing standards and review processes across a team

• CI/CD & cloud: Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions), containerisation (Docker), and cloud deployment practices (e.g. AWS); able to improve and own pipeline standards across teams

• Observability: Experience with logging, distributed tracing, metrics, and alerting strategies for production backend services

• AI-native development: Actively uses AI coding tools (e.g. Copilot, Cursor, or similar) as a core part of your engineering workflow, and can help define how the t