Lead Java Engineer

About the Company

We are working with an early-stage technology company building an AI-powered commerce platform for the print and custom products sector. The platform supports the full customer journey, from understanding product requirements through to artwork, pricing, supplier selection, manufacturing and fulfilment.

The Role

We are hiring a Senior / Lead Java Engineer to own a key catalogue integration workstream.

We are hiring a Java Engineer to own the ingestion of manufacturer product catalogues into the platform. This is the pipeline that pulls each supplier’s printable products, formats, specifications, options, pricing and lead times, then normalises them into a single internal model that the platform can sell and order against.

The work is already underway in partnership with an established print manufacturer’s engineering team. You will start by embedding with that team to understand what has been built and take a full handover, before bringing the project in-house and leading it internally. Over time, you will extend the integration pipeline to additional manufacturers.

This is a hands-on role with real ownership from day one. You will shape how catalogue data is modelled, ingested, validated and kept in sync across a growing set of suppliers.

What You Will Do

• Embed with a partner engineering team, learn the existing catalogue ingestion work and take a clean handover
• Bring the project in-house and establish it within the company’s codebase and architecture
• Lead the catalogue ingestion workstream, designing, building and owning robust, maintainable ingestion pipelines
• Model and normalise heterogeneous supplier catalogue data, including products, specifications, options, pricing and lead times, into a unified internal representation
• Build reliable sync logic, handling updates, deltas, validation and data-quality monitoring
• Integrate with supplier systems via APIs and structured data feeds, including REST and file-based formats such as JSON, XML and CSV
• Extend the pipeline to onboard further manufacturers
• Work closely with the wider engineering and product team, setting the technical direction for this area

Must Have

• Strong commercial Java experience with Spring / Spring Boot
• Solid data-modelling skills and experience with relational databases, such as PostgreSQL
• Experience integrating third-party APIs and parsing structured data feeds, including JSON, XML or CSV
• A self-starter who can take ownership, work through ambiguity and lead a workstream in an early-stage environment
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to embed with an external team and take a structured technical handover

Nice to Have

• Domain experience in print, e-commerce, product catalogues or supplier / distributor integrations
• Event-driven or messaging experience, such as Kafka or queues
• Cloud experience, ideally AWS or GCP
• Containerisation experience, ideally Docker