Lead Java Engineer

Job Title: Lead Java Engineer

Location: St. Louis MO

Duration: / Term: 6 months

Experience Desired: 12 Years

Job Description:

We are seeking a highly accomplished Principal Java Engineer to lead the design and evolution of large-scale mission-critical backend systems. This role is ideal for a hands-on technical leader who combines deep Java expertise with architectural vision performance optimization skills and a strong engineering craftsmanship mindset.

You will define technical direction guide engineering standards and build highly scalable resilient systems operating at high throughput (TPS) in cloud-native environments.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead architecture and design of high-scale distributed systems using Java
• Define and enforce engineering best practices coding standards and design principles
• Design scalable microservices and event-driven architectures
• Drive performance optimization scalability improvements and system reliability
• Mentor senior engineers and influence cross-team technical decisions
• Conduct architectural reviews and provide consultative guidance
• Ensure high code quality through TDD code reviews static analysis and automation
• Collaborate with Product DevOps and Platform teams to align system design with business goals
• Lead modernization initiatives (legacy to microservices monolith decomposition cloud migration)
• Contribute to observability resilience and fault-tolerant system design

Technical Expertise Required:

Core Java & Backend

• Deep expertise in Java 8/11/17
• Strong knowledge of:

• Lambda expressions & Stream API
• Concurrency & multithreading
• CompletableFuture & async programming
• JVM performance tuning & memory management

• Extensive experience with Spring Boot / Spring Cloud

Architecture & Distributed Systems

• Microservices architecture
• Event-driven systems (Kafka or equivalent)
• REST API design (spec-first / OpenAPI preferred)
• High-availability & fault-tolerant system design
• Circuit breakers rate limiting caching strategies
• Horizontal scaling and high TPS environments

Data & Persistence

• Strong expertise with: Oracle / DB2 / PostgreSQL / MySQL MongoDB or other NoSQL databases
• Data modeling for high-scale systems
• Performance tuning (query optimization indexing strategies)

DevOps & Platform

• CI/CD (Jenkins GitHub Actions or equivalent)
• Docker & Kubernetes
• Observability tools (Prometheus Grafana ELK etc.)
• Cloud platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP)

Code Quality & Engineering Excellence

• TDD / BDD
• Static analysis tools (SonarQube)
• Strong understanding of design patterns & SOLID principles
• Experience in conducting architectural reviews

Leadership Expectations

• Act as a technical authority and strategic advisor
• Influence engineering culture toward craftsmanship and excellence
• Challenge assumptions using data and performance benchmarks
• Mentor engineers across levels
• Drive long-term architectural vision

Ideal Background

• 12 18 years of experience in backend engineering
• Proven track record of designing high-scale always-on systems
• Experience in payments telecom fintech healthcare or other high-throughput domains preferred
• Strong communicator capable of presenting to senior stakeholders

Key Skills:

Java 8/11/17 Lambda Stream API JVM Kafka