Associate Technical Lead - Java : 7 - 10 yrs experience | Leads 5 - 7 engineers - Core Java / J2EE - System Design - Product Thinking | AI-Assisted Dev

We're looking for someone who can get that architecture right, build it hands-on, and grow the 5 - 7 engineers who ship it with them - without losing a step on either the design or the calendar.

System Design :

- Design systems, not just code.

- Own high- and low-level design for distributed systems handling large-scale billing and usage data across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

- Weigh trade-offs - cost vs. latency vs. reliability - and defend the reasoning, not just the diagram.

- Define APIs, data models, and integration patterns for queuing, caching, and event-driven flows.

- Run architecture reviews; surface tech debt early and own the remediation plan, not just the finding.

Product Thinking :

- What we specifically probe for in the system design round.

- Turn an ambiguous ask into a scoped design - the right clarifying questions before the right diagram.

- Weigh build-vs-buy and MVP-vs-scale against real timelines and business impact, not textbook completeness.

- Notice when a design is solving the wrong problem, and say so - to us, before the customer does.

- Shape the road-map with Product, not just execute what lands in the backlog.

Team Leadership :

- Own outcomes for 5 - 7 engineers.

- Mentor and grow a team of 5 to 7 engineers; run 1 : 1s that move careers forward, not just status updates.

- Set clear goals, give direct feedback, and address under-performance before it drifts.

- Build a culture where design and code reviews raise the bar instead of gate-keeping.

- Resolve conflict and re-balance workload before it becomes a delivery problem.

Delivery & Time Management :

- Protect the calendar as hard as the codebase.

- Own delivery across parallel work-streams; size realistically and flag risk early, not at the deadline.

- Run Agile ceremonies that unblock the team instead of consuming its week.

- Split time deliberately between hands-on coding and leadership - both slip when this is left to chance.

Hands-on Engineering :

- Still writing the code you review.

- Ship production Java/J2EE code and set the standard for the pull requests you review.

- Build with Spring, Hibernate, and REST; work across MySQL/Oracle and MongoDB/DynamoDB.

- Use AI coding tools deliberately - Kiro, Claude Code - to move faster, without shipping code the team can't explain.

Must have :

- B.E./B.Tech/MCA with 7 - 10 years of hands-on experience in Core Java and J2EE, end-to-end in an Agile environment.

- A track record of owning system architecture you can defend in detail - real decisions, real trade-offs, real failures you designed around.

- 2+ years leading a team of 5 - 7 engineers, with evidence of people you've grown, not just projects you've shipped.

- Product judgment : comfortable pushing back on a requirement when the trade-off doesn't hold up.

- Strong time management - proof you can run delivery and people management in parallel without either slipping.

- Hands-on with Spring, Hibernate, REST, TDD, and CI (Maven/Gradle/Jenkins).

- Everyday, hands-on use of AI coding tools (Kiro, Claude Code, etc.), with the judgment to know where an AI/LLM component genuinely belongs in a design - not just where it's trendy.

- Solid grounding in design patterns, OOAD, and integration patterns for queuing and caching.

- Comfortable across relational and NoSQL stores - MySQL/Oracle plus MongoDB/DynamoDB/Cassandra.

- Communicates design decisions clearly to engineers, PMs, and leadership alike.

- Experience owning production incidents end-to-end - triage, mitigation, and postmortems that prevent a repeat, not just patch the symptom.

Good to have :

- Cloud experience on AWS/Azure/GCP, or FinOps / cost-optimization domain exposure - it's literally what we do.

- Microservices, event-driven architecture.

- Experience in a high-growth product company.

- Calm under pressure, with a genuinely analytical mind.