Lead Software Engineer

Lead Software Engineer – Java & AWS

Role Overview: Seeking a hands-on Lead Software Engineer (Java & AWS) to design and deliver cloud-native platforms with Java as the primary stack and AWS as secondary. Emphasis on technical depth, mentorship, driving projects, and crisp stakeholder communication.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architecture & Cloud Design: Define service/data architectures, select AWS services/patterns for scale, resilience, security, and cost.
• Build & Delivery: Implement Java/Spring Boot microservices and REST APIs, manage API lifecycle, ensure operational readiness.
• Quality & Reliability: Establish test strategy, implement resilience patterns and caching, enforce CI quality gates.
• Security & Compliance: Implement OAuth2/JWT, secrets management, encryption, align to org policy and regulatory standards.
• Observability & Cost: Implement logs/metrics/traces, define SLIs/SLOs, alerts, dashboards, design for right-sizing, autoscaling, and cost efficiency.
• Mentorship & Collaboration: Mentor engineers, communicate options/trade-offs/risks clearly with Product/Architecture/SRE/Security.
• 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+: OOP & SOLID, Streams, Optional, functional interfaces, lambda expressions.
• Concurrency: Thread pools, Future/CompletableFuture, synchronization, locks, concurrent collections, Java Memory Model, heap/stack, GC insights.
• Web & API: RESTful design (idempotency, pagination, error models), rate limiting, API gateway concepts, Swagger/OpenAPI.
• Spring: Spring Core (IoC/DI), Spring MVC, Spring Boot (auto-config/starter deps), Spring Security (JWT/OAuth2), Spring Batch, Spring AOP.
• Architecture & Patterns: Event-driven design (MQ/queueing), patterns—Factory, Builder, Strategy, Template.
• Data & Testing: Strong SQL, JUnit 5/Mockito/Testcontainers, contract & performance testing.
• Tooling & Observability: Maven/Gradle, Git, CI/CD, logs/metrics/traces (OpenTelemetry).

AWS (Secondary):

• Core: 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, VPC (subnets, SGs/NACLs), Secrets Manager/Parameter Store, basic WAF.
• IaC & Deployments: AWS CDK (TypeScript preferred) or Terraform/CloudFormation, blue/green, canary, feature flags, zero-downtime deployments.
• Reliability & Cost: Autoscaling, throttling, DLQs, retries/backoff, cost-aware designs (right-sizing, storage tiers, DynamoDB capacity models).

Good to Have:

• Step Functions, Kinesis/MSK, ElastiCache, OpenSearch.
• Kubernetes/EKS, GitOps-friendly workflows.
• Chaos testing and DR strategies, multi-account landing zone familiarity.

Soft Skills:

• Strong problem-solving, analytical thinking, and bias for action.
• Plans, prioritizes, and communicates effectively across teams and time zones.
• Mentors teammates, provides clear, constructive feedback.
• Demonstrates ownership, raises the bar, and consistently exceeds day-to-day expectations.
• Identifies ambiguity/risks and proactively drives clarity and resolution with stakeholders.