Lead Engineer - Java

Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and manage a team of 8-10 engineers, fostering technical excellence and continuous growth.
• Drive architectural discussions and provide technical leadership for backend and distributed systems development.
• Plan, prioritise, and execute engineering deliverables while collaborating with global cross-functional teams.
• Own technical decision-making, code quality, scalability, security, and system reliability.
• Design and develop high-performance, scalable, and secure microservices-based applications.
• Establish engineering best practices around API design, cloud-native development, testing, and deployment.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, architects, QA engineers, and DevOps teams in an Agile environment.
• Champion modern software engineering practices, including CI/CD, observability, automation, and cloud adoption.
• Create an inclusive, high-performing engineering culture that attracts and retains top talent.
• Stay updated with emerging technologies and drive innovation across backend platforms.

Requirements:

• 8-12 years of software engineering experience with strong expertise in backend development.
• Strong hands-on experience in Java, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and microservices architecture.
• Proven experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems and enterprise applications.
• Strong experience in designing, developing, and securing RESTful APIs.
• Experience with API design standards, OpenAPI/Swagger specifications, API documentation, and API lifecycle management.
• Hands-on experience with API Gateway integration and API management platforms.
• Good understanding of OAuth2 OpenID Connect (OIDC), JWT authentication, authorisation, and API security best practices.
• Experience building cloud-native applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and DevOps practices.
• Experience with event-driven architectures using Kafka.
• Exposure to Elasticsearch for search and analytics use cases.
• Experience with Scala is preferred.
• Strong understanding of OOP, design patterns, data structures, algorithms, and system design.
• Experience integrating applications with databases such as Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, or similar.
• Strong knowledge of version control systems (Git) and project tracking tools (JIRA).
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments with Test-Driven Development (TDD) and quality engineering practices.

Leadership Skills:

• Proven experience leading and mentoring engineering teams.
• Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Ability to drive technical roadmap, architectural decisions, and engineering best practices.
• Excellent communication, problem-solving, and decision-making abilities.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with service discovery and resilience patterns (Eureka, Hystrix/Resilience4j).
• Exposure to containerisation and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with observability tools, monitoring, and logging frameworks.
• Knowledge of AI-assisted development tools and modern engineering productivity practices.

Nice to Have:

• Experience building platform engineering or API-first products.
• Experience with multi-cloud environments.
• Exposure to GenAI/LLM integrations and AI-powered backend services.