Java & AWS Engineer - Manchester (Hybrid)

About the role

We're hiring three Java & AWS Engineer contractors for the Attractions Connectivity team, which builds the services that connect us to third-party attraction providers - handling product data, availability, reservations, webhooks, and partner communication.

You'll work on the connectivity estate, making partner integrations faster to build, safer to operate, and easier to scale. Hands-on role across software delivery, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and production operations.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and operate cloud-native Back End services for Attractions integrations.
• Own work end to end - from requirements to safe deployment to learning from production behaviour.
• Build reusable foundations for partner integrations, data ingestion, transformation, and reliable communication.
• Develop services on AWS and Kubernetes, with event-driven patterns and Kafka where appropriate.
• Design for resilience, scalability, observability, security, and operational simplicity.
• Use logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts to diagnose issues and improve service health.
• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, data specialists, and partner-facing colleagues.
• Contribute to design docs, code reviews, testing strategy, and engineering improvements.

What we're looking for

• Experience building and operating production software systems.
• Strong Back End engineering, ideally Java with Spring or Spring Boot.
• Practical AWS and cloud-native development experience.
• Experience with Kubernetes or similar container platforms.
• Familiarity with Kafka or other event-streaming technologies.
• Experience designing and integrating HTTP APIs with external systems.
• Solid distributed-systems fundamentals - resilience, idempotency, retries, timeouts, rate limiting, observability.
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD.
• Ability to investigate production issues systematically and turn learnings into improvements.
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Partner integrations, marketplaces, travel, or E-commerce domains.
• Data ingestion, transformation pipelines, canonical models, or schema evolution.
• Infrastructure-as-code or platform engineering.
• High-scale or event-driven systems.
• Security, privacy, and compliance for Back End services.

Working model

Contractor role based in Manchester, hybrid - one day per week in the office. Three engineers needed, starting as soon as possible. Potential for extension, subject to business needs (not guaranteed). No out-of-hours on-call participation.