Contract Software Engineer - Java - Remote - £600pd - 6 Months

Senior Software Engineer - Java - Remote - £600pd - 6 Months

We are looking for a senior engineer who can walk into a live production estate, form a system-wide view quickly, and start delivering the work that actually matters. This is a six-month, fully remote contractor engagement for someone who already operates with limited guidance and is comfortable in ambiguous problem spaces.

You will not be hired to polish tickets. You will identify architectural deficiencies and bottlenecks that constrain the team, then ship pragmatic fixes that balance immediate delivery with longer-term business needs. You will split large pieces of work so they can run in parallel and come back together cleanly. You will triage real customer issues, surface risk and edge cases early, and design and implement software that is complex, critical, or both.

Much of that work sits in an event-driven architecture and is shaped by domain-driven design. You should be able to reason about bounded contexts, aggregates, and ubiquitous language, and to design services and events so that coarse- or fine-grained separation is a deliberate trade-off rather than an accident. You will make those trade-offs with a clear view of business impact, not only technical elegance.

The work rewards people who write inventive, secure, maintainable code that others can extend without archaeology. You follow and raise the bar on operational excellence, security, and quality. You resolve root causes rather than symptoms. When technical views collide, you help the room find a path that is good enough now and still defensible later. You leave documentation, pairing, and a structured handover so the team is stronger when the engagement ends.

You will work primarily in Java with Spring Boot, REST APIs, Gradle, Git, AWS, and MongoDB. Experience operating non-trivial distributed systems — including their security, performance, and operational characteristics — is assumed. So is judgement: when to reuse, when to refactor, and when not to over-engineer.

If you onboard fast, communicate clearly with engineers and senior stakeholders, and take satisfaction in making complicated event-driven, domain-modelled software simpler, this is the kind of contract that uses the full range of a senior engineer.