Job Summary:

We are looking for a Principal Java Backend Engineer to drive the architecture, technical strategy, and engineering excellence of complex backend platforms.

This role requires deep expertise in Java ecosystems, distributed systems, large-scale microservices, cloud-native architecture, and system performance.

The successful candidate will influence technical decisions across teams and guide the design and delivery of highly reliable enterprise applications.

Key Responsibilities:

- Define and evolve the architecture of large-scale backend platforms and distributed applications.

- Establish technical direction, architecture standards, and engineering best practices across multiple teams.

- Lead the design of resilient, scalable, secure, and highly available systems using Java and modern backend frameworks.

- Evaluate architectural alternatives and make decisions regarding service decomposition, data ownership, integration patterns, and technology selection.

- Design distributed systems addressing fault tolerance, consistency, concurrency, latency, throughput, and recovery.

- Drive platform modernization, legacy application transformation, and migration to cloud-native architectures.

- Establish API governance, event-driven integration standards, service contracts, and versioning practices.

- Guide database architecture, caching strategies, data access patterns, and performance optimization.

- Define standards for observability, production readiness, incident management, disaster recovery, and service reliability.

- Drive secure-by-design practices, threat mitigation, access control, and compliance with organizational security standards.

- Partner with engineering leaders, product stakeholders, architects, and infrastructure teams to align technology decisions with business objectives.

- Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, building strong engineering capabilities across teams.

- Review critical designs and complex implementations, identify technical risks, and ensure sustainable architecture.

- Drive engineering productivity through automation, CI/CD improvements, testing strategies, and developer tooling.

- Lead resolution of high-impact production incidents and establish preventive measures.

Required Skills:

- Extensive hands-on expertise in Java, JVM internals, concurrency, garbage collection, memory management, and performance optimization.

- Deep experience with Spring Boot, microservices, and enterprise application architecture.

- Proven expertise in distributed systems, high-throughput services, and large-scale backend platforms.

- Strong understanding of event-driven architecture, messaging systems, and asynchronous communication.

- Advanced knowledge of database design, distributed data management, caching, and transaction consistency.

- Experience architecting cloud-native applications on AWS, Azure, or GCP.

- Strong knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and production observability.

- Expertise in system design, design patterns, domain-driven design, and architecture documentation.

- Strong understanding of application security, resilience engineering, scalability, and disaster recovery.

- Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience with high-availability, high-volume enterprise systems.

- Exposure to platform engineering, service mesh, API management, and developer platforms.

- Experience with architecture governance, technology roadmaps, and technical modernization initiatives.

- Knowledge of SRE principles, service-level objectives, and operational excellence.

Key Competencies:

- Strategic technical leadership, architecture ownership, engineering mentorship, cross-functional influence, complex problem-solving, and alignment of technical strategy with business outcomes.