Lead Java Engineer

Title: Lead Software Engineer

# of Openings: 1

Position Type: Contract to Hire

Locations: Louisville, KY

Additional Details:

6 months contract W2

Only Visa independent candidates

ECommerce/Retail experience is mandatory

Remote (Candidates from EST zone only)

Description:

Summary:

We are seeking a hands-on Lead Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for Delivery and Mapping systems that power delivery, order awareness, and real-time operational workflows. In this role, you will shape architecture, set engineering standards, mentor engineers, and stay close to the work through solution design, implementation guidance, code reviews, troubleshooting, and production readiness. Experience in QSR, restaurant technology, last-mile delivery, logistics, or delivery platforms is highly desirable.

Responsibilities:

• Lead architecture and engineering direction for scalable, resilient microservice platforms supporting delivery and order-awareness capabilities.
• Design, build, and maintain backend services using modern Java and Spring Boot.
• Guide API design, asynchronous workflows, event-driven integrations, and real-time processing solutions.
• Promote engineering best practices for code quality, testing, observability, resiliency, security, and performance.
• Design and operate cloud-native applications on Google Cloud Platform.
• Build and maintain cloud infrastructure using Terraform and Infrastructure as Code principles.
• Partner with Product, Architecture, QA/QE, Infrastructure, Security, Operations, and engineering teams to turn business needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Provide technical leadership across onshore and offshore teams.
• Mentor engineers, facilitate design discussions, and help teams make sound technical decisions.
• Review designs and pull requests to improve quality and consistency across codebases.
• Lead troubleshooting and root-cause analysis for complex production issues across applications, cloud infrastructure, networking, messaging systems, and third-party integrations.
• Design reliable vendor and partner integrations with strong failure recovery, observability, security, and supportability.
• Reduce technical debt while balancing long-term architecture goals with delivery commitments.
• Create and maintain technical documentation, architecture decisions, system diagrams, and operational guidance.
• Support production deployments, large-scale rollouts, and launch readiness for business-critical initiatives.

Requirements:

• Extensive software engineering experience, including Staff, Principal, Lead, or equivalent technical leadership experience.
• Advanced Java skills, preferably Java 21 or newer.
• Strong hands-on experience with Spring Boot and the Spring ecosystem.
• Deep understanding of microservices and distributed-system design, including service boundaries, domain-driven design, REST APIs, event-driven architecture, asynchronous messaging, idempotency, resiliency, security, observability, high availability, and scalability.
• Strong experience designing cloud-native applications on Google Cloud Platform.
• Hands-on experience with Cloud Run or similar container platforms, Pub/Sub or similar messaging technologies, cloud networking, IAM, secret management, monitoring, logging, observability, and NoSQL or distributed data stores.
• Strong Terraform experience, including designing, reviewing, troubleshooting, and maintaining Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience operating production systems with high availability, scalability, latency, and resiliency requirements.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, automated testing, containerization, and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience leading technical initiatives across distributed and offshore teams.
• Ability to mentor engineers and influence technical direction without relying solely on authority.
• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving environment with multiple initiatives and dependencies.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience in QSR, restaurant technology, e-commerce fulfillment, logistics, last-mile delivery, or order-awareness platforms.
• Experience integrating with third-party delivery providers, logistics platforms, mapping or routing providers, or external SaaS platforms.
• Experience with real-time location tracking, dispatch, order lifecycle, driver workflows, or delivery-status processing.
• Experience with high-throughput event-driven architectures using Google Pub/Sub, Kafka, or similar technologies.
• Experience with multi-region or active-active cloud architectures.
• Experience applying distributed-system resiliency patterns such as graceful degradation, retries, circuit breakers, idempotency, and dead-letter handling.
• Experience with device telemetry, IoT platforms, real-time tracking systems, embedded systems, firmware, or C/C++ is a plus.
• Experience integrating cloud services with IoT or embedded devices, including telemetry, device provisioning, OTA firmware updates, or cellular-connected devices, is a plus.