Technical Lead - Degrees

Job Title: Technical Lead — Backend (Spring Boot / Distributed Systems)

Location:

About the Role:

We are seeking a hands-on Technical Lead (Backend) with deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot to lead the design, development, and operation of scalable, secure backend services. You will own system architecture, mentor engineers, and drive delivery quality across microservices, data stores, observability, and DevOps collaboration. This is a leadership-and-coding role—expect to contribute to design reviews and critical code paths while guiding the team.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the architecture and development of backend services and APIs using Java/Spring Boot; drive microservices patterns, data modeling, and service boundaries.
• Ensure performance, reliability, and security: conduct capacity planning, profiling, and hardening (rate limiting, input validation, secrets hygiene, OWASP).
• Define integration patterns for synchronous (REST/gRPC) and asynchronous (Kafka/RabbitMQ) communication; champion idempotency and exactly-once semantics where needed.
• Design persistence layers with relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and caching (Redis); guide schema evolution and migration strategies.
• Set up and enforce testing strategy (unit, contract, integration, load), CI/CD, and release readiness across environments.
• Partner with DevOps on containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS), infrastructure-as-code, observability (logs/metrics/traces), and incident response.
• Establish authentication/authorization (OAuth2, OIDC, JWT) and multi-tenant best practices (isolation, quotas, rate limits).
• Mentor the team through code reviews, pairing, and design sessions; uphold coding standards and documentation quality.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, and cross-functional stakeholders to plan sprints and deliver business outcomes on time.
• Continuously reduce technical debt; lead root-cause analyses and preventative engineering after incidents.

Skills & Experience Required:

• Java/Spring Boot: REST, Spring Data/JPA & Hibernate, Spring Security, actuator/health checks, configuration management.
• Distributed Systems: microservices patterns, resiliency (circuit breaker, retries, backoff), idempotency, eventual consistency, saga/outbox patterns.
• Messaging: Kafka or RabbitMQ (topics, partitions, consumer groups), stream processing basics.
• Data: PostgreSQL/MySQL (query optimization), Redis (caching patterns); exposure to NoSQL/Search (MongoDB/Elasticsearch) is a plus.
• Cloud & DevOps: AWS preferred (EKS, RDS, S3, SQS/SNS), Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD (GitHub Actions/Jenkins), infrastructure-as-code.
• Observability: structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry/Jaeger/Prometheus/Grafana); SLOs and alerting.
• Security & Compliance: OAuth2/OIDC/JWT, secrets management, least privilege, audit logging; familiarity with data privacy practices.
• Quality: JUnit/Testcontainers/Mock frameworks, contract testing, load testing (Gatling/JMeter).
• Leadership: team mentorship, backlog planning, clear stakeholder communication; ability to simplify complex trade-offs.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 5+ years of backend development experience, including 2+ years in a technical leadership capacity.

Bonus Points

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS at scale, including region pinning and per-tenant observability.
• GraphQL exposure; real-time updates (WebSockets) where appropriate.
• Performance profiling and capacity planning; cost-awareness in design (e.g., caching, batch vs. streaming).
• Contributions to open source, tech talks, or technical writing.