Lead Software Engineer - Java

We're not looking to fill a seat. We're looking for a senior engineer with a track-record of impact who's outgrown their current environment; someone technically solid but frustrated by the pace, the bureaucracy, or the lack of genuine ownership.

At Transferz, we're building a global ground transportation platform serving 150+ countries, and we need engineers who treat the codebase like it's theirs. Not "responsible for", actually theirs. From architecture decisions to production incidents, from technical strategy to customer impact. We’re a decisively-small team with big ambitions and it’s key for us to operate in this way to move at our desired pace.

If this sounds scary, it might not be for you. But if you find yourself aspiring for more we want to hear from you.

A microservice platform that handles ground transportation for 10,000+ travellers daily. The challenge isn't extreme scale – it's building the right things quickly and maintaining quality as we grow.

Our stack: Spring Boot 3.5, JPA/Hibernate, Docker, GitHub Actions, GCP, GraphQL. We maintain >90% test coverage because we care about shipping with confidence, not ticking compliance boxes.

You'll design and build features end-to-end. You'll influence technical direction across multiple teams. You'll mentor engineers through example and guidance. You'll challenge product ideas with technical insight and our own business ideas to enhance the customer experience.

We work in-person from our Amsterdam office because we value the energy we get from this high-bandwidth collaboration. This is a small team where your decisions visibly shape the company's trajectory.

You'll fit if you:

• Move fast with context – You understand the business problem, make pragmatic trade-offs, and ship. You're not reckless, but you don't gold-plate solutions either.

• Own outcomes, not tasks – You take responsibility for what ships, not just what's assigned. When something breaks, you fix it. When you see a better approach, you drive it forward. When things are unclear, you make them clear.

• Think in systems, not just code – You consider how your work fits the bigger picture: performance implications, operational burden, team velocity, commercial impact.

• Work with agency – You prototype before you perfect. You'd rather ship and iterate than debate endlessly.

• Communicate effectively – You can explain technical decisions to product managers and challenge product decisions with technical insight. You make others better through clear thinking.

This role isn't for you if you:

• Need detailed specifications and clear escalation paths before you can start, we expect you to define the path forward when it's ambiguous

• Resist adopting AI tools or prefer traditional workflows over efficiency, we're actively building an AI-first engineering culture and won't slow down for sceptics

• Wait for permission rather than demonstrating initiative, autonomous decision-making is the baseline, not a bonus