Sr. Software Engineer I at Yum! Brands

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Java Technical Leader to lead and grow a team of Software Engineers delivering scalable, secure, and high-quality backend systems.

In this role, you will combine strong Java architecture expertise, technical leadership, and modern engineering practices, including effective use of AI-assisted tools to improve productivity, quality, and decision-making.

You will work closely with international stakeholders, take end-to-end ownership of technical outcomes, and foster a culture of engineering excellence, continuous learning, and smart adoption of new technologies.

Core Java & Backend Expertise

• Strong expertise in Java, including OOP, multithreading, concurrency, collections, and performance tuning.

• Hands-on experience with Spring / Spring Boot, Spring Data, Dependency Injection (DI), and transaction management.

• Solid experience designing and building RESTful APIs and distributed microservices architectures.

• Experience with SQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and NoSQL solutions (e.g., MongoDB, DynamoDB).

• Strong understanding of data modeling, query optimization, and backend performance tuning.

• Hands-on experience with AWS (e.g., EKS, S3, RDS, Lambda).

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices.

• Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools such as Data Dog for metrics, logs, and traces.

Ways of Working

• Proficient with GitLab for version control and collaboration.

• Experience working in Agile / Scrum environments.

• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to make sound technical decisions under constraints.

• Bonus / Differentiators

• Proven experience using AI tools in daily engineering work (coding, debugging, testing, design, or operations).

• Ability to mentor others on productive and responsible AI usage.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes (K8s): containerization, deployment, scaling, and service-to-service communication.

• Strong spoken and written English for international collaboration

Technical & Team Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and coach a team of Software Engineers, supporting their technical growth and career development.

• Act as a hands-on technical leader, setting coding standards, architectural principles, and best practices.

• Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and learning-oriented team culture with strong ownership and accountability.

• Guide engineers on effective and responsible use of AI tools to enhance daily engineering work (e.g., design, coding, debugging, testing, documentation).

• Proactively identify, troubleshoot, and resolve complex performance or scalability issues.

• Work closely with DevOps/SRE teams to improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment reliability, and runtime stability.

• Drive improvements in system observability, monitoring, and alerting.

• Ensure high standards of code quality through design reviews, code reviews, automated testing, and documentation.

• Design, develop, and review robust Java-based systems using Spring ecosystem and microservices architecture.

Global Collaboration

• Work effectively with cross-functional and international teams (e.g., UK, US).

• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

AI-Augmented Engineering (Big Plus)

• Leverage AI-assisted developer tools (e.g., for code generation, refactoring, test creation, log analysis, incident triage, and documentation) to:

• Improve development speed without compromising quality

• Reduce repetitive manual work

• Support faster debugging and root-cause analysis

• Promote best practices for AI usage, including validation of outputs, security awareness, and IP safety.

• Explore and propose practical AI use cases in backend engineering, and system observability.