Outside Spy
Glasgow, UK
A system that has run for over twenty years still underpins core production across dozens of sites worldwide. It's now at end of life, and replacing it is a funded, multi-year programme. You'd own the back-end architecture for the new one.
This is business-critical in the literal sense: when the current system goes down, production stops. So the standards you set are load-bearing from week one, and the work shows up where the business actually feels it.
It's greenfield in the languages that matter (Kotlin/Java, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, an event-driven core). The harder problem is the knowledge itself. Two decades of hard-won operational logic sits in the heads of a few domain experts and inside a legacy database nobody wants to touch. A large part of the job is building the migration that lifts that knowledge into a clean, event-driven codebase, one area at a time, without dropping a single transaction in a business that never pauses.
A few...