Backend Developer

Johannesburg Remote
Salary: Market Related
Job Type: Permanent
Sectors: Investment Technology
Reference: 149598

Apply before Jan 05 2026 | 55 Days left

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Vacancy Details

Employer: Dis-Chem Life

Purpose of the Role:

At Dis-Chem Life, we are building systems that protect lives, accelerate innovation, and drive digital transformation at scale. As our Backend Engineer, you will design and build the core services, platforms, and APIs that power every product we deliver and every life we cover.

This is not a role for the average engineer. We are looking for someone who blends elite backend architecture with craftsmanship, operational excellence, and a startup-hardened mindset.

Your mission: to architect, implement, and operate secure, scalable, and high-performance backend systems that enable faster, safer, and smarter product delivery.

You will collaborate with product managers, frontend engineers, other backend engineers, data scientists, actuaries, and DevOps to deliver domain-rich services, enable event-driven integrations, and ensure our systems are observable, reliable, and built for change.

Role Summary

This role is responsible for designing, developing, and operating Dis-Chem Life’s backend platforms and services to enable rapid, reliable, and scalable software delivery. The Backend Engineer will lead the implementation of domain-driven, cloud-native architectures; define and evolve service boundaries; and deliver high-quality APIs and data pipelines that underpin the resilience and efficiency of our technology landscape.

To succeed, you must be highly proficient in backend software design, test driven development, distributed systems, API development, and secure data handling. You will take full ownership of service performance, reliability, code quality, and production operations—ensuring our systems run at enterprise scale while enabling agility and innovation.

This role demands a technically strong, self-driven engineer with deep backend experience and the ability to collaborate across engineering, data, and product teams.

Key Responsibilities

Backend Architecture & Development

Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performing backend services and APIs.

Lead the adoption of domain-driven design (DDD), clean architecture, and SOLID principles.

Implement robust data models and persistence strategies with strong consistency and performance characteristics.

Build event-driven and asynchronous workflows using messaging/streaming platforms.

Establish API standards, versioning strategies, and documentation practices.

Reliability, Performance & Operations

Drive performance optimisation through profiling, caching, indexing, and query optimisation.

Embed observability across services: structured logging, metrics, tracing, SLIs/SLOs, and error budgets.

Champion testing excellence: unit, property-based, contract, integration, and load testing.

Own production readiness: blue/green or canary releases, graceful degradation, and robust rollback paths.

Partner with SRE/DevOps to ensure secure, automated deployments and operational excellence.

Security & Compliance

Implement secure coding practices and threat-aware designs (input validation, least privilege, encryption in transit/at rest).

Manage identity, auth, and access patterns (OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, mTLS, fine-grained authorisation).

Ensure data governance and privacy controls aligned to regulatory and internal standards.

Collaboration & Delivery

Work closely with product and stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical designs and iterative delivery plans.

Mentor engineers, conduct code and design reviews, and raise the quality bar across the codebase.

Drive continuous improvement of engineering practices, tooling, and standards.

Technical Skills

Essential:

Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages and ecosystems (e.g., Java/Kotlin with Spring Boot, C#/.NET, Go, or Python/FastAPI).

Deep experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs and building resilient, idempotent endpoints; exposure to gRPC or GraphQL.

Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts: consistency, partitioning, resiliency patterns (circuit breakers, retries, backoff), eventual consistency.

Data stores: relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and at least one NoSQL store (e.g., DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis); schema design, indexing, and migration strategies.

Messaging and streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS, RabbitMQ) and event-driven architecture.

Testing: unit, integration, contract (e.g., Pact), end-to-end, and performance/load testing.

Observability: metrics, logs, and tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, CloudWatch/X-Ray).

Secure development practices, secrets management, and API security patterns.

Comfortable with containerisation (Docker) and deploying to Kubernetes/EKS or equivalent.

Beneficial:

Experience with CQRS and event sourcing where appropriate.

Knowledge of caching layers and patterns (Redis, CDN, application-level caches).

Experience with feature flags, canary releasing, and progressive delivery.

Exposure to serverless components (e.g., AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions) and microservices at scale.

Familiarity with data pipelines and analytics integrations for downstream consumers.

Understanding of financial services domains or actuarial/data integrations.

Soft Skills

Ownership-driven, autonomous, and accountable.

Thrives in fast-paced, entrepreneurial environments; bias for action and outcomes.

Exceptional problem-solving with a performance and reliability mindset.

Strong written and verbal communication; able to collaborate across technical and non-technical teams.

Passionate about craftsmanship, documentation, and continuous improvement.

Experience

6+ years’ experience building and operating backend systems in production.

Proven track record designing and maintaining high-scale, mission-critical services in cloud environments (AWS preferred).

Experience delivering greenfield systems and evolving legacy platforms incrementally.

Demonstrated impact in agile, product-led, high-stakes settings.

Prior experience in regulated or financial services environments is advantageous.

Qualifications

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent practical experience).

Relevant certifications beneficial (e.g., AWS Certified Developer/Solutions Architect; domain-specific security certifications).

Nice-to-Have AWS Alignment

Services: EC2, EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, ALB/NLB, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, Kinesis, ElastiCache/Redis, Secrets Manager, Cognito, CloudWatch, X-Ray.

Practices: Infrastructure-as-Code collaboration with DevOps (Terraform/CloudFormation), cost-aware designs, and security-first architectures aligned to CIS and IAM best practices.

What Success Looks Like

Measurable improvements in latency, throughput, and error rates against defined SLOs.

Clearly defined and documented service boundaries with stable, versioned APIs.

Robust test coverage and automated quality gates in CI/CD.

Zero-trust principles applied across services with least-privilege access and strong auditability.

Predictable, low-risk deployments and fast, reliable incident recovery.

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About Dis-Chem Life

Who is Dis-Chem Life?

We get asked that a lot. The real question is, Who are we becoming?

We could tell you we were once a bold start-up called OneSpark.
That in 2020, we reimagined life insurance from the ground up with AI-driven underwriting, world-first product innovation, and a mission to make protection accessible for every South African.

We could tell you we are backed by global giants like Gen Re, and Guardrisk.

That we won awards for being one of the most innovative life insurers.

That our founders, Greg and Josh, didn’t just build a product they built a movement.

We could tell you that in 2024, we partnered with one of the most trusted names in retail healthcare, Dis-Chem and by 2025, became Dis-Chem Life, merging cutting-edge insurtech with a national footprint of over 295 pharmacies and 400 clinics.

But the real story? It’s who we are now.

We’re a company that moves fast, builds smart, and leads with purpose.

We create with curiosity, test with intensity, and act with heart. We are advisors, technologists, designers, and builders, working together to make life, disability, and funeral cover simpler, smarter, and available to the people who need it most.

Our culture is electric. Our ambition is unmatched. And our mission is personal, to protect the lives of South Africans in ways the industry never has.

We are not just offering jobs we are offering a chance to shape the future of insurance.

One product. One client. One breakthrough at a time.

We are Dis-Chem Life.