Staff Software Engineer Java

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our core platform engineering team. In this senior individual-contributor role, you will shape platform architecture, simplify complex integration landscapes, and lead modernization across a broad microservice ecosystem. You will partner with engineering leads, product managers, and architects to define technical vision across multiple systems, influencing roadmaps across teams, driving multi-quarter initiatives, raising engineering standards, and improving platform reliability, scalability, security, and developer effectiveness across the organization to help ship systems that handle millions of transactions per day.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and implement highly available, fault-tolerant microservices using Java and Spring Boot deployed on AWS.
• Lead the technical design of distributed systems including event-driven architectures, service mesh patterns, and asynchronous processing pipelines.
• Define caching strategies using Redis (Cluster / Sentinel) to optimize latency and throughput across high-traffic payment flows.
• Drive database design and optimization across relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, Cassandra) datastores, including sharding, indexing, and query performance tuning.
• Champion engineering best practices: code reviews, test-driven development, CI/CD pipelines, observability (metrics, logging, tracing), and incident retrospectives.
• Collaborate with architects to evaluate and adopt AWS-native services (EKS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, RDS, ElastiCache, API Gateway) for scalable, cost-effective solutions.
• Mentor and coach engineers across levels, providing technical guidance, design feedback, and career development support.
• Partner with Product and Business stakeholders to translate complex requirements into robust technical plans with clear milestones.
• Contribute to long-term platform roadmap decisions, including build-vs-buy evaluations, technology migrations, and capacity planning.
• Identify and drive resolution of systemic reliability, performance, and security issues across services.
• Use AI-assisted approaches responsibly to accelerate large-scale framework upgrades, reduce manual effort, and improve migration repeatability across services and libraries.
• Act as a technical multiplier through design reviews, mentorship, implementation guidance, operational rigor, and clear technical communication across teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong backend focus.
• Expert-level proficiency in Java (Java 11+), including concurrency, JVM tuning, and modern frameworks such as Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.
• Deep experience designing and operating microservices in production service decomposition, API contracts (REST / gRPC), versioning, and inter-service communication patterns.
• Strong command of distributed systems concepts: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, leader election, distributed transactions, and saga patterns.
• Hands-on AWS experience with services including EC2, EKS/ECS, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, ElastiCache, CloudWatch, and IAM.
• Proficiency with Redis — caching patterns, TTL strategies, pub/sub, Lua scripting, and cluster management.
• Solid database expertise across both SQL and NoSQL — schema design, query optimization, connection pooling, and data modeling.
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) in a production environment.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar) and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or CloudFormation).
• Strong communication skills — able to articulate technical trade-offs to both engineering and non-engineering audiences.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in fintech, payments, gift cards, or high-volume e-commerce platforms.
• Knowledge of PCI-DSS compliance requirements and secure coding practices in payment systems.
• Familiarity with event streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka or AWS Kinesis.
• Contributions to open-source projects or published technical writing.
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, Developer, or DevOps Engineer) are a plus.