Lead Java Backend Engineer

Presently we are unable to sponsor and request applicants to apply who are authorized to work without sponsorship Job Description: Lead Java Backend Engineer Location: Jersey City, NJ/New York, NY (Onsite) About the Role We are looking for a seasoned backend engineer to design, build, and scale distributed, event-driven systems using Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, and AWS.

You will own the architecture of critical services, set engineering standards, and mentor engineers while staying hands-on in the code.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable, secure backend services using Core Java and Spring Boot.
• Architect microservices, defining service boundaries, data ownership, and communication patterns.
• Develop RESTful APIs with clear contracts, versioning, security, and OpenAPI documentation.
• Build event-driven solutions with Apache Kafka (topic design, partitioning, consumer groups, delivery guarantees).
• Deploy and operate services on AWS (ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS/DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, MSK, IAM, CloudWatch).
• Drive resilience with circuit breakers, retries, idempotency, and graceful degradation.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues, including JVM tuning and heap and thread dump analysis.
• Lead design and code reviews, produce architecture documents, and mentor engineers.
• Champion CI/CD and automated testing (unit, integration, contract, performance).

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Expert Core Java (concurrency, collections, JVM internals, Java 8+; Java 17/21 preferred).
• Deep experience with Spring Boot and the Spring ecosystem (Data/JPA, Security, Cloud).
• Strong REST API design experience, including OAuth2 and JWT.
• Proven delivery of microservices in production.
• Hands-on Kafka experience (producers, consumers, error handling, DLQs).
• Strong AWS and cloud-native design experience.
• Solid SQL and at least one NoSQL database.
• Knowledge of distributed patterns (saga, outbox, CQRS).
• Proficiency with JUnit, Mockito, Testcontainers, Docker, Git, Maven/Gradle, and CI/CD tools.
• Strong communication and technical leadership skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Kubernetes, Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog).
• Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, schema registry.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools.
• AWS certification.
• Financial services domain experience.