Consultant - Software Engineer

Consultant Software Engineer

We are seeking a Consultant Software Engineer with Java as the primary skill and AWS as secondary to architect and deliver scalable, secure, and resilient cloud-native platforms. This is a hands-on technical role covering design, implementation, performance, security, and observability—combined with technical mentorship, accountability for outcomes, and clear stakeholder communication.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architecture & Solution Design: Translate business and NFRs into robust service, data, and integration designs, document decisions (ADRs), define API contracts and versioning strategies.
• Build & Delivery: Implement Java/Spring Boot microservices and REST APIs, design event-driven integrations, ensure backward compatibility and operational readiness.
• Cloud Engineering (AWS): Select and apply the right AWS services/patterns (serverless vs. containers) for scale, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Quality Engineering: Establish test strategies (unit, integration, contract, performance), enable shift-left quality with CI quality gates and automated pipelines.
• Performance & Resilience: Profile JVM and databases, tune queries and memory, apply resilience patterns (circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads) and effective caching.
• Security & Compliance: Implement secure coding, OAuth2/JWT, secrets management, encryption, align to policy/regulatory requirements and support risk remediation.
• Observability & Operability: Implement logs/metrics/traces, define SLIs/SLOs, actionable alerts, dashboards, drive incident readiness and RCAs.
• Cost Optimization: Right-size resources, design efficient data access patterns, and apply autoscaling, lifecycle policies, and caching/CDN strategies.
• Stakeholder Communication: Communicate options, trade-offs, risks, and delivery plans clearly with Product, Architecture, Security, and SRE.
• Technical Mentorship: Mentor engineers via pairing, code/design reviews, and knowledge shares, contribute reusable libraries, templates, and IaC modules.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies: (stand-ups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, demos, retros) with a focus on technical outcomes, risk surfacing, and sprint goal clarity.
• Refine stories into actionable technical tasks: ensure Definition of Ready/Done, unambiguous acceptance criteria, testability, and accurate story point estimation.

Qualifications:

Must-Have Skills:

Java (Primary):

• Java/Java 8+
• Deep OOP and SOLID principles.
• Proficiency with Streams API, Optional, functional interfaces, lambda expressions.
• Multithreading & Concurrency: Thread pools, Future/CompletableFuture, synchronization, locks, concurrent collections.
• Java Memory Model & JVM: Heap/stack, GC behavior/tuning, classloading basics.
• Web & API
• Design/implement RESTful APIs (idempotency, pagination, error models).
• Rate limiting & API Gateway concepts, OpenAPI/Swagger documentation.
• Exposure to enterprise web servers (WebLogic/WebSphere) or embedded servers (Tomcat/Jetty).
• Spring Framework
• Spring Core (IoC/DI), Spring MVC, Spring Boot (auto-configuration, starter dependencies).
• Spring Security (JWT, OAuth2), Spring Batch, Spring AOP.
• Data & Integration
• Strong SQL (PostgreSQL/MySQL): schema design, indexing, query tuning.
• Caching (Redis), messaging/eventing (Kafka/RabbitMQ), outbox/idempotency patterns.
• Engineering Excellence
• Build/CI/CD: Maven/Gradle, Git, Jenkins/GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps, trunk-based or GitFlow.
• Testing: JUnit 5, Mockito, Testcontainers, contract testing (Pact), performance testing (JMeter/Gatling).
• Observability: Structured logs, metrics, OpenTelemetry tracing, ELK/Prometheus/Grafana dashboards.
• Security: OWASP Top 10, dependency scanning, SBOM awareness.
• AWS (Secondary)
• Core Services: Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, RDS/Aurora, EventBridge, SQS, SNS, ECS/Fargate, monitoring with CloudWatch/X-Ray, auditing with CloudTrail.
• Security & Networking: IAM (least privilege), KMS encryption, VPC (subnets, SGs/NACLs), Secrets Manager/Parameter Store, basic WAF.
• Infrastructure as Code: AWS CDK (TypeScript preferred) or Terraform/CloudFormation, environment promotion and GitOps-friendly workflows.
• Reliability & Cost: Autoscaling, throttling, DLQs, retries/backoff, cost-aware designs (right-sizing, storage tiers, capacity models for DynamoDB).
• Deployment Patterns: Blue/green, canary, feature flags, zero-downtime deployments.

Good to Have:

• Step Functions, Kinesis/MSK, ElastiCache, OpenSearch.
• Containers/orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes/EKS.
• API versioning strategies and consumer-driven contracts.
• Chaos testing, DR/backup planning, and multi-account landing-zone familiarity.

Soft Skills:

• High ownership and accountability for delivery quality, performance, and reliability.
• Clear stakeholder communication with options, trade-offs, and data-backed recommendations.
• Mentorship mindset, collaborative, pragmatic problem-solving and strong documentation.