Kunai, part of the PwC Network, builds full-stack technology solutions for financial services. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to support a digital payments modernization program, focusing on integrating a major card network into a large financial institution while contributing to both legacy and modern infrastructure.
Responsibilities:
- 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
- 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
- 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:
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, primarily in Java
- Strong working knowledge of relational databases — Oracle and/or PostgreSQL required
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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