[**GrayHair**](https://grayhairsoftware.com/) has spent **over 25 years** turning US postal mail into data worth its weight in gold: they process **more than 125 billion data points a year** for Fortune 500 banks, insurers and healthcare companies.

There are already several Manfred folks on the team (and they keep asking us for more, so they must be doing something right 😏). Now they're looking for a **full-stack engineer with a Java backend soul** who wants to rewrite their legacy with a modern stack… while half of Spain is already sitting down for dinner.

If you code better after sunset, this one's for you. 🦉

## What will you do?

**First, a bit of context 📬**

Before we get down to business, let's take a quick trip back in time ⏳. GrayHair was born in **2000** as a mail-tracking service. By 2008 they had a solid client base and four more services. In 2016 the company lost its founder and, far from falling apart, it reinvented itself: it stopped being "the company that tracks letters" and became **the data tech company it is today**. By 2020 the whole team was remote, with one clear goal: transform their technology from top to bottom.

So what exactly do they do? Their own motto sums it up: *Undeliverables? Unacceptable!* 📮 A letter that doesn't arrive means a credit card in the wrong mailbox, an angry customer calling the bank, or a marketing campaign straight into the bin. GrayHair exists to make sure that doesn't happen.

To pull this off, **they handle around 25% of all US postal data** and track billions of mail pieces every year. And since they work with data as sensitive as that of banks and insurers, security and engineering quality are non-negotiable.

**Their catalogue is pretty packed:**

• 📍 **GH Mail Tracking Platform:** tracks every mail piece from the moment it's sent until it arrives (or doesn't).
• 🏠 **Address quality:** tools like CASS™, 48-month NCOALink® (they're a certified Full Service Provider), VerifyAQ™ and returns management (ACS™), so their clients' databases are always clean.
• 💳 **GH Card Insights™** (launched in July 2026): turns credit and debit card delivery into useful intelligence for fraud, operations and customer experience teams.
• 📈 **GH Direct Mail IQ™:** solves one of marketing's biggest headaches, proving how much revenue direct mail really drives in an omnichannel strategy.
• ☎️ **GH Contact Center Connector™:** brings real-time postal data into call centers to cut down on "where's my letter?" calls.

It's no coincidence that *Mailing Systems Technology* magazine named them a **"Hot Company"** in 2025. And all of this runs on a lot (and we mean a lot) of software… which is exactly where you come in. 😏

**🫵 So, what's your role in all this?**

GrayHair is in the middle of a **tech transformation**: they're redesigning all their services from scratch on **AWS**, with **Java microservices**. Most of the work is backend (in fact, several teams are focused on this migration), but they also build internal and client-facing interfaces in **React**, plus key pieces such as **identity management**.

Your mission: take legacy applications, understand them, carefully take them apart and put them back together with a modern stack. And along the way, build new features end to end, from the endpoint to the button in React, designed to move data volumes that would make any system sweat. Here, performance, resilience and security aren't buzzwords for the interview: they're your day-to-day.

You're not here to babysit a cobweb-covered monolith: you're here to build the platform for the years to come. 🧹

• **Redesign and refactor legacy applications** using **Java 17+**, **Spring Boot** microservices and modern **React** patterns.
• **Design, build and deploy end-to-end features** for high-throughput, cloud-native applications on **AWS**.
• **Write clean, maintainable code**, backed by **unit and integration tests** (JUnit on the backend, Jest on the frontend). Tests are not optional here.
• **Research new tools and architectural trends** to make the system faster, more resilient and easier to maintain.

Before the shopping list, a bit of context so you understand **why** each thing is on it. 🛒

**The team**

You'll join a small development team (around 8 people) with a very healthy mix of profiles: seniors who've been around for years, like Manu, the Tech Lead, and people who've grown in-house (one of them started as an intern). They're looking for someone with **around 5 years of experience**: autonomous enough to own their tasks and with the judgement to propose improvements, leaning on the Tech Lead for the big architecture decisions. Nobody expects you to lead from day one, but they do expect you to contribute.

**What does a typical day look like? 🕒**

• ☀️ Mornings are for living. At 3:00 pm you log on, catch up on Slack and have a sync with the team.
• ⌨️ You dive into your sprint task: for example, turning a legacy process into a Spring Boot microservice that consumes messages from an SQS queue and writes to PostgreSQL.
• 🔍 You open your PR with its tests, a teammate reviews it (and you review theirs), and GitHub Actions takes it all the way to ECS.
• 📊 You check CloudWatch to make sure what you deployed behaves well under real traffic.
• 🗓️ Every 3 weeks, a refinement session kicks off the next sprint with clear tasks.

**Must-haves (and why)**

• ☕ **Java backend, the heart of the role.** Advanced Java 17 and Maven, and solid experience with Spring and Spring Boot. Most of the work is backend: rewriting legacy services as modern microservices.
• ☁️ **AWS, where everything lives.** This isn't "push it to the cloud and forget about it": you build, deploy and keep an eye on what you own. Services run in containers on **ECS**, talk to each other through queues and events (**SQS/SNS**), use **Lambda** and **Step Functions** to orchestrate processes, sit behind **API Gateway**, store data in **RDS/Aurora** and report through **CloudWatch**. You don't need to be a cloud architect, but you do need to have wrestled with these services in production. That's why Docker or Kubernetes are a plus: if you've worked with containers, you'll get ECS in a couple of afternoons.
• ⚛️ **React, so the frontend doesn't fall behind.** They build internal and client-facing interfaces, plus the identity management side. The stack includes state management like **Effector** or **RxJS**, **Material UI** and **Jest**. They're not after a frontend specialist, just someone who's comfortable when it's needed.
• 🗄️ **SQL, because data is the business.** **SQL Server** in the legacy world and **PostgreSQL** in the new one: you'll move between both, with a lot of volume.
• 🧪 **Quality and CI/CD.** **JUnit**, **Git/GitHub** and **GitHub Actions**. When you're handling data for banks and insurers, "it works on my machine" doesn't cut it.
• 💂 **Fluent English:** it's the working language **1**00% of the time.

**Bonus points**

An AWS certification, infrastructure as code (CloudFormation or Terraform), Docker, Node.js or Python, Step Functions, Playwright, SonarQube or identity management with Auth0. Great if you bring any of them, but none are essential.

And don't worry: nobody masters all of this 100%. If you've got the essentials and you're keen to learn the rest, apply. 😉

**Salary:** up to €66,000

• 🏖️ **23 days of holidays** + national, regional and local public holidays + **your birthday off**.
• 🌏 **100% remote** from anywhere in Spain.
• ☀️ **Free mornings** to do whatever you like.
• 💻 **Choose your own equipment.**
• 📚 **Training and conference budget.**
• 🤝 **Volunteer Time Off** to dedicate time to social causes.
• ✈️ **Annual offsite in the US**, all expenses paid.
• 🎉 **Team-building events and activities.**

**100% remote from Spain!**

GrayHair's HQ is in Stuart, Florida, but their culture is **remote-first**: the team is spread between the US and Spain, and what matters is results, not your zip code (and believe us, they know a thing or two about zip codes 📮).

You'll be hired in **Spain** through an EOR (a company specialized in remote hiring), with all the guarantees of Spanish employment law.

Once a year, though, the whole team gets together in **the US for a multi-day offsite**, with travel and accommodation covered. It's not mandatory, but they'll miss you if you don't go 🌴

You'll join the development team led by **Kash Patel** (Engineering Manager), who will also lead the technical side of the hiring process. It's a small, tight-knit team where knowledge is shared without ego, and where a good question is worth as much as a good answer.

Some of the people you'll work with most

• [**Kash Patel** (Engineering Manager)](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kashpatelsem/): loves complex technical challenges and really values collaborative work.
• [**Manu Garea** (Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead)](https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuelgarea/): has been at GrayHair for years and acts as the bridge between Product and Tech.
• [**Marcella Barker** (Chief of Staff)](https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcella-wolf-barker/): will be part of the hiring process and is your connection to the business vision.

Oh, and you won't be alone in Spain: there are already several Manfred folks on the team, so there'll be someone to tell you what it's like to work for a US team from here 😉

Here's a photo from a recent offsite in Florida: (same photo as the Spanish version)


If there's one thing that sets GrayHair apart, it's their **flat structure**. No need to book a meeting with three bosses to pitch an idea: you'll have **direct access to team leads and leadership**, and plenty of **autonomy** to decide how to solve technical problems.

• 🔁 **Agile for real:** they work in **3-week sprints**, and each one kicks off with a **refinement** session so tasks arrive well defined (yes, you read that right: well-defined tasks 🙌). Everything is managed in **Jira**, and architecture decisions are documented in **Confluence**.
• 💬 **Open communication:** constructive feedback flows constantly, and day-to-day life happens on **Slack**, where they share ideas and help each other out.
• 📹 **Cameras on:** they're a 100% remote team that cares a lot about human connection, so cameras stay on in meetings. Nobody here is just a circle with initials.
• 🧪 **Quality first:** code reviews, unit and integration tests, and tools like SonarQube and GitHub Actions, so whatever reaches production gets there in good shape.

And one detail we love: they have a **Volunteer Time Off policy** so you can dedicate time to social causes. As they put it, they value service as much as innovation 💙