Consultant - Software Engineer

Consultant Software Engineer

Responsibilities Experience: 10+ years

Role Overview: We are seeking a Consultant Software Engineer with Java as the primary skill and modern UI as secondary to design and deliver scalable, secure, and high-performance platforms. This is a hands-on technical role focused on architecture, implementation, performance, security, and observability—combined with mentorship, accountability for outcomes, and crisp stakeholder communication.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architecture & Solution Design: Translate business goals into robust service and integration designs, define API contracts, data models, and component boundaries, record ADRs.
• Build & Delivery: Implement Java/Spring Boot microservices and RESTful APIs, integrate with React/TypeScript/Next.js UIs, ensure backward-compatible API evolution.
• Quality Engineering: Establish and maintain a test strategy (unit, integration, contract, and E2E where applicable), enforce CI quality gates and coding standards.
• Performance & Resilience: Profile JVM, queries, and I/O, apply caching, implement resilience patterns (retries, backoff, circuit breakers, bulkheads).
• Security & Compliance: Apply secure coding, implement OAuth2/JWT, input validation, encryption at rest/in transit, support audit/risk remediation.
• Observability & Operability: Implement structured logs, metrics, and distributed tracing, define SLOs/SLIs, actionable alerts, and dashboards for release/production health.
• Stakeholder Communication: Communicate trade-offs, risks, and options clearly to Product/Architecture/QA, align scope and timelines with data.
• Technical Mentorship: Mentor engineers via pairing, design/code reviews, and knowledge shares, contribute to reusable libraries and UI components.
• 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): Core Java / Java 8+: Deep OOP & SOLID, Streams API, Optional, functional interfaces, lambda expressions.
• Multithreading & Concurrency: Thread pools, Future/CompletableFuture, synchronization, locks, concurrent collections, understanding of Java Memory Model, heap/stack, GC behavior/tuning.
• Web & API: Design/implement RESTful APIs (idempotency, pagination, error models), rate limiting & API Gateway concepts, Swagger/OpenAPI documentation.
• Spring Ecosystem: 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, query tuning, caching (Redis), messaging/eventing exposure (Kafka/RabbitMQ) and outbox/idempotency patterns.
• Testing & Tooling: JUnit 5, Mockito, Testcontainers, contract testing (Pact preferred), build with Maven/Gradle, Git, CI/CD (Jenkins/GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps).
• Observability & Reliability: Structured logging, metrics, OpenTelemetry tracing, dashboards/alerts (ELK/Prometheus/Grafana).
• Security: OWASP Top 10 mitigations, secrets management, dependency/SBOM scanning.
• UI (Secondary): React + TypeScript + Next.js: Component-driven development, hooks, state management (Redux/RTK/Zustand), SSR/SSG/ISR, routing, image optimization.
• Web Foundations: Semantic HTML5, modern CSS (Flexbox/Grid), modern JS (ES6+).
• Performance & Accessibility: Core Web Vitals optimization (TTFB, LCP, CLS, INP), code splitting, caching/CDN, WCAG 2.1 accessibility practices.
• Security: CSP, sanitization/output encoding, XSS/CSRF protections.
• Testing: Jest, React Testing Library, Playwright/Cypress for E2E.
• Integration: Robust consumption of Java APIs, auth flows (OAuth/OIDC, JWT), error handling and retry UX.

Good to Have:

• Design systems (Storybook, tokens/theming) and monorepos (Nx/Turborepo).
• Web servers (WebLogic/WebSphere) familiarity or embedded servers (Tomcat/Jetty).
• Containers (Docker) and orchestration basics (Kubernetes/ECS).
• API versioning strategies and consumer-driven contracts.

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.