AI-native Software Engineer - Java Backend / Microservices

AI-native Software Engineer, Java Backend / Microservices (m/f/d)

Porto, Portugal | Product Engineering | Mid-level or senior

Why SOFICO?

SOFICO is an international Belgian software product company with more than 35 years of experience and an open, horizontal culture. We build Miles, an enterprise platform for automotive finance, leasing, fleet and mobility. It covers the full contract lifecycle, from quotation and pricing to billing, assets and integrations.

Our Product organisation is growing, and we’re setting up three new end-to-end software delivery teams. In Porto, we’re hiring three Software Engineers.

Your role

You’ll join an end-to-end delivery team of engineers and analysts, working closely with Product and Architecture. The team owns its work from discovery and design through release and production.

We’re looking for AI-native engineers, or engineers who want to become one. AI agents are part of how you work every day. You use them to explore the problem, write specs, build and test code, and review changes. You stay responsible for the design and for the quality of what ships.

We also want engineers who ask why a capability is needed, who will use it and how it makes the product better. You’ll help shape solutions, make informed trade-offs and own the outcome.

What will you do?

• Design and build Java backend services and microservices that turn complex business requirements into clear domain models;
• Use Domain-Driven Design to define service boundaries, responsibilities and interactions, both synchronous and asynchronous;
• Build and evolve APIs as products, paying attention to consumer needs, documentation, versioning and backward compatibility, together with internal consumers and colleagues who integrate with external systems;
• Work with AI agents across the whole lifecycle, from specification and design to implementation, testing and review;
• Critically review and validate agent output, and take responsibility for everything that gets merged;
• Investigate production issues and use what you learn to improve reliability;
• Take part in code reviews and engineering decisions;
• Help your team find agentic workflows that work, improve them and share them with the wider engineering community.

What do you bring?

• Strong hands-on experience with Java and modern backend development;
• Experience with Domain-Driven Design, turning business concepts into software models and service boundaries;
• Experience building REST APIs with their consumers in mind;
• Experience with microservices, SQL and relational databases;
• Daily use of AI coding assistants or engineering agents, or a strong drive to build that habit quickly;
• The judgement to tell when agent output is good enough and when it isn’t;
• A product mindset: you want to understand the problem, challenge assumptions constructively and own delivery across the full lifecycle;
• Willingness to travel occasionally to our other international offices.

Nice to have:

• Spec-driven development (SDD) or other spec-first ways of working with AI agents;
• Experience setting up or improving agentic workflows for a team;
• Quarkus;
• Kafka or other messaging technologies, and event-driven architectures;
• Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD and cloud-native development;
• Observability and production troubleshooting.

You don’t need to know every technology from day one. You don’t have to be AI-native yet either, but you do need to want to get there. We care about understanding the business behind the code, learning quickly and using sound judgement in what you ship.

What’s in it for you?

• Competitive salary package;
• Meal allowance per working day;
• Fully covered private health insurance;
• Hybrid working and flexible hours;
• Modern co-working space in Porto;
• Structured onboarding with a dedicated coach;
• Room to help shape how your team works with AI agents;
• Ongoing learning opportunities;
• Casual drinks, team activities and company-wide events.

Ready to build products, own delivery and work as an AI-native engineer? Join SOFICO in Porto.