Senior Backend Java and AWS Engineer

Job Title: Senior Backend Java and AWS Engineer

Location: Chicago, IL 60603 (Onsite)

Duration: 13 months contract

Must Have Skills/Attributes:

·         AWS

·         Java

·         Spring Boot

·         SQL

Experience Desired:

·         Advanced Java and/or Kotlin in production environments (10 yrs)

·         Strong AWS expertise (10 yrs)

·         Spring Boot building microservices and REST APIs (10 yrs)

·         Microservices architecture and distributed systems patterns (10 yrs)

·         RESTful API design and implementation with documentation (10 yrs)

·         SQL and relational databases (10 yrs)

·         NoSQL non-relational data stores (10 yrs)

Required Minimum Education: Bachelor’s Degree

Job Description:

Required Skills:

·         Strong AWS expertise – designing and operating cloud-native, highly available distributed systems.

·         Advanced Java and/or Kotlin in production environments.

·         Spring Boot – building microservices and REST APIs (Spring Web/MVC, dependency injection, configuration, actuator/health checks).

·         Microservices architecture and distributed systems patterns (service boundaries, resiliency, fault tolerance).

·         RESTful API design and implementation with documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger).

·         SQL and relational databases – data modeling, query tuning, performance optimization.

·         NoSQL / non-relational data stores (e.g., DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra).

·         CI/CD pipelines and build/deploy automation (quality gates, repeatable releases).

·         Data streaming / asynchronous messaging – event-driven patterns (e.g., Kafka).

·         Observability – logging, metrics, tracing, and production troubleshooting / incident investigation.

Soft Skills (Must-Have):

·         Strong technical communication skills – able to clearly explain complex designs and trade-offs to engineers, product owners, and managers.

·         Collaborative mindset – ability to work effectively across teams on shared architectures and dependencies.

·         Technical leadership and ownership – driving decisions and follow-through on complex engineering problems.

·         Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking – especially in debugging, production support, and performance issues.

·         Ability to balance technical depth with delivery – making pragmatic decisions aligned with business priorities.

·         Comfortable participating in Agile ceremonies (stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives) while remaining primarily hands-on.

Job Requirements:

·         Provide deep technical leadership for the design and implementation of Java-based, cloud-native systems on AWS.

·         Define service architecture, data flows, and integration patterns to meet strict scalability, availability, and security requirements.

·         Drive architectural decisions across microservices, event-driven, and asynchronous processing patterns.

·         Ensure clear service ownership and well-defined contracts between services.

·         Define standards for infrastructure-as-code, resiliency, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation.

·         Proactively identify architectural bottlenecks, scalability constraints, and technical debt.

·         Lead development of core backend services using modern Java frameworks and AWS-native patterns.

·         Design and implement RESTful and event-based APIs.

·         Build message-driven processing and distributed data management solutions.

·         Guide adoption of AWS services including managed compute, messaging, storage, and databases.

·         Investigate and resolve defects, performance issues, and production incidents.

·         Implement fixes and improvements to ensure system stability and reliability.

·         Support reliable operation of distributed systems in production through observability, logging, metrics, and tracing.

·         Review pull requests and lead technical design discussions.

·         Define architecture and implementation standards for the team.

·         Establish technical best practices for CI/CD automation, observability, and production troubleshooting.

·         Work closely with the engineering team to guide design and implementation of Java-based services on AWS.

·         Collaborate with other engineering teams to align on APIs, integrations, and shared cloud architecture.

·         Partner with Product Owners and engineering managers to translate requirements into technical solutions.

·         Align execution with delivery priorities.

·         Participate in architecture reviews and integration discussions.

·         Participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, and retrospectives.

·         Attend necessary technical and operational calls.