Senior Java Developer

About ITRex THE PLACE ITRex - AI pioneers who build systems that actually work in the real world, not just in demos. We're 250+ people spread across the US and Europe, creating solutions for companies like Procter & Gamble and Shutterstock. We keep it simple, build it right, and focus on what works. THE PEOPLE We're the kind of people who don't ignore messages in Slack, who jump in to help when you're stuck on a problem, and who offer solutions instead of blame when things go sideways. We believe in openness, accountability, and having each other's backs. No office politics, no hidden agendas - just people who care about doing good work together and supporting each other to get there. THE ROLE We are looking for a senior Java engineer to join a team in the middle of a serious AI transformation, building a Spring Boot microservices backend on Kubernetes and bringing AI into the whole development process - so we need someone who already works this way, can judge when an AI suggestion helps versus quietly introduces a bug, and wants to help shape that practice for the team, working daily in pair programming and a cross-functional group alongside product, QA and DevOps. The engagement runs to the end of the year, with a high probability of extension Your Responsibilities Design, build and own Spring Boot microservices and the Web APIs around them, from the data model through to what runs in Kubernetes Take end-to-end responsibility for the features you ship: schema, service, API contract, tests, pipeline and the behaviour in production Use AI assistance deliberately across the development cycle - design exploration, implementation, refactoring, tests, review - and stay accountable for everything that gets merged Help establish the team's AI-assisted engineering practice: what works, what to avoid, where a human review gate belongs, and how new joiners get up to speed with it Pair with other engineers on hard problems and share context instead of hoarding it Contribute to architectural decisions on service boundaries, communication patterns and data ownership, and argue your position clearly when you disagree Keep the build pipeline healthy: GitLab and Jenkins stages, test suites, container builds and Terraform-managed infrastructure Review other people's code with the same care you want applied to your own Work directly with product, QA and DevOps to turn ambiguous requirements into something shippable, rather than waiting for a fully specified ticket As a lead, set technical direction on your part of the system and mentor the engineers around you Requirements Our Expectations Core Java: Java 11 and Java 17, the concurrency model, collections, memory behaviour and the language features that actually changed how modern services are written Solid, production-grade experience with the Spring Framework and Spring Boot: dependency injection, configuration, Spring Data, Spring Security, REST controllers and the testing…