Senior Backend Engineer (Java) - AI

Senior Backend Engineer (Java) – AI

Join Zepz: Breaking Down Borders, Together
Our Meaningful Mission

At Zepz, we're all about breaking down barriers for our customers and our teammates. Our purpose is deeply personal, we provide a lifeline and deliver opportunities to cross-border communities that need it most through cutting edge finance and tech.Zepz is the power behind WorldRemit and Sendwave,  driven by the mission to celebrate the incredible impact migrants have, both at home and abroad. We're not just moving money; we're building a world that truly recognizes and supports global connections.

Who You'll Be Joining
We look for mission-driven builders who thrive in a fast-paced environment connected to a true purpose. We’re an always developing team of experts that enjoy problem solving and bring clarity to tough challenges. At Zepz, we are Relentless Learners, always seeking feedback, and  Responsible Owners, treating company resources like your own. We depend on Transparent Communicators who keep the team aligned through open, honest talk.

Our Core Commitments — What We Live By
Our vibrant and truly diverse culture is built on three core commitments, that guide how we work and interact:

• Integrity: We always do the right thing. It’s simple, but it’s the foundation of everything we build for our customers and each other.
• Outcomes: We work for our customers. Their success and prosperity are the results we focus on delivering.
• Velocity: We are fast! We maintain high energy levels and make smart decisions quickly, keeping us nimble and ahead of the curve.

Perks of Joining Our Team
We believe in empowering colleagues because we genuinely trust our team. Our culture is founded on this high trust, which naturally encourages the high ownership that drives us to meet our shared high expectations and deliver high performance. While we have all the tools to work remotely, we value the purpose and benefits of in-person connections so we expect our teams to come to the office on a regular basis, and therefore be within a comfortable commutable distance from our London office. Alongside a great office environment, think unlimited annual leave , great healthcare benefits, and employee discounts. We want you to thrive and focus entirely on making your biggest impact! In turn, we expect you to bring high ownership and commitment to your work. This is a place where we value trust and high performance, and we'll provide the environment and support needed for you to excel.

About the role and team
As a Senior Backend Engineer in the FinCrime domain, you will work within a cross-functional feature team building the services that detect and prevent financial crime across WorldRemit and Sendwave, spanning transaction monitoring and alert generation, customer screening, enhanced due diligence, and customer risk rating. These are high-throughput, regulator-facing systems where every decision has two costs: a missed risk, or a legitimate customer stopped mid-transaction. Getting that balance right is the job.

You will have the autonomy to make platform decisions and provide insights to the rest of the team. You'll collaborate closely with engineers of varying experience levels and interests, helping to improve and develop our services, build pipeline, and tooling.

Much of what we're building now is agentic AI workflows that tackle FinCrime problems at scale: agents that triage and investigate alerts, gather the evidence an analyst would otherwise assemble by hand, and draft the narrative behind a regulatory submission. Done well, that clears false positives faster than any team could on its own and leaves our analysts on the cases that genuinely warrant them.

There's a lot of regulatory and domain context to absorb alongside the systems, and you'll have the support and time to ramp up properly. You'll be committing, reviewing, and shipping code early on, with the support and time to ramp up properly. There's a lot of regulatory and domain context to absorb alongside the systems.

Reliability is core to the role: the team owns its services in production, and you'll take part in the on-call rotation, responding to incidents, supporting production, and driving remediation and long-term fixes. A screening outage or a rule that silently stops firing is a compliance event, not just a degraded service, so detection and evidence matter as much as the fix.

What you bring to the table

Technical Skills

• Several years of experience building backend services at scale.
• Strong understanding of modern JVM development centered around Java and the Spring ecosystem (Spring Boot).
• Proficiency in Java; interest in or experience with Kotlin or Python is a plus.
• Experience designing and operating REST/gRPC APIs, event-driven and streaming systems (e.g. Kafka), and relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL).
• Comfort integrating and operating third-party vendor platforms, where you own the reliability of something you don't control.
• Experience working with large transaction and event datasets, and enough SQL to investigate a question yourself rather than wait on someone.
• Ability to work with AI in a safe, structured environment.
• Ability to work with tools like Grafana and Loki for debugging and fault finding.
• Some understanding of Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and AWS cloud is advantageous, as well as technologies like Terraform.

Technical Execution

• You take pride in writing readable, well-designed, and well-tested software.
• You will improve code structure and have an impact on architecture.
• You will actively review tech designs and code from others.
• You'll improve monitoring and the health of your team's systems.
• You'll participate in on-call and production support — triaging incidents, restoring service, and following through on remediation so issues don't recur.

What you will focus on

• Designing and building the services that generate, enrich, and route financial crime alerts across both brands.
• Building agentic workflows that investigate alerts end to end, and the evaluation harnesses that prove they are safe to trust.
• Integrating and owning the reliability of third-party monitoring and screening platforms.
• Turning analyst workflow pain into tooling, working directly with the compliance teams who use it.
• Making the whole thing auditable, because every automated decision has to be explainable to a regulator after the fact.

Nice to have/ Bonus Points if you have

• Experience with transaction monitoring, screening, or case management platforms (Unit21, Actimize, ComplyAdvantage, LexisNexis or comparable).
• Experience building or operating rules engines, risk scoring, or automated decisioning systems.
• Familiarity with AML and CFT regulatory requirements in international payments, including regulatory reporting obligations.
• Experience in fintech or other regulated, high-availability environments.
• Familiarity with any of the communities we serve.

AI Literacy & Tools
As Zepz continues to build AI into how we work, we expect everyone to engage with it as a core part of their role. For this position we are looking for:

• A genuine curiosity about AI and how it can be applied in your area of work — from accelerating analysis and insight generation, to improving how we design and deliver processes and communications.
• Practical experience using AI tools in a professional context — whether to connect information, draft content, build frameworks, or create insights from data. We want people who actively use AI to increase productivity, not those who are waiting to be told to.
• Strong AI literacy — an understanding of what AI assistants can and cannot do, how to prompt effectively, and how to critically evaluate AI-generated output before using it.
• Awareness of the ethical considerations and responsible use of AI in the workplace, particularly in the context of sensitive data, customer experience, and compliance.
• Prior experience using Claude (Anthropic) is a nice-to-have but not essential — what matters most is that you are genuinely engaged with AI as a tool, comfortable experimenting, and eager to share what works with your wider team

If you want to join us in our journey to help break barriers in financial access and improve lives globally, there's no better place or time to join.

Our global team of 800+ people is spread across six continents. We aspire to hire the best mix of people from former Olympians to YouTube influencers and we speak over twenty languages. This incredible diversity isn't a bonus; it's the engine that lets us serve the world.

Ready to Apply? Let’s Go.