Senior Backend Engineer Java Scala

RESPONSIBILITIES:
Kforce has a client in Greenwood Village, CO that is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer Java Scala. The Senior Backend Engineer Java Scala will be responsible for the full lifecycle of backend services: from design and development through production reliability. In an era where AI can generate code, we value engineers who think critically, anticipate problems, and drive systems forward.

Responsibilities:
* Own features from design -> development -> testing -> deployment -> production support
* Take accountability for the reliability and performance of your services in production
* Drive technical decisions without waiting to be told what to do
* Design scalable, resilient distributed systems handling millions of daily transactions
* Make pragmatic trade-off decisions (consistency vs. availability, complexity vs. speed)
* Produce clear technical design documents and lead design reviews
* Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with data
* Build high-throughput, low-latency microservices
* Write clean, maintainable code, but more importantly, know when and what to build
* Write meaningful unit, integration, and contract tests, not just for coverage metrics
* Own E2E test strategy for your services
* Build confidence in deployments through automated validation
* Datadog - build dashboards, set meaningful alerts, track SLOs, analyze APM traces
* Splunk - log analysis, search queries, correlation across services for incident investigation
* *Analyze production incidents: read logs, trace requests, identify root cause under pressure
* Think about failure modes before they happen (circuit breakers, retries, fallbacks, graceful degradation)
* Participate in on-call rotations and drive blameless post-mortems
* Proactively identify capacity risks and performance bottlenecks
* Identify risks, tech debt, and performance bottlenecks before they become incidents
* Propose and drive improvements - don't wait for a ticket

REQUIREMENTS:
* Understand distributed tracing, structured logging, and metric-driven decision making
SRE Mindset
* Strong proficiency in Java and/or Scala
* Hands-on with AWS services (ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, SQS, CloudWatch, IAM)
* Understand networking, security, and cost implications of architectural choices
* Comfortable with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation)
* Kafka - design event-driven architectures, manage topics, handle consumer lag and rebalancing
* Redis - caching strategies, pub/sub, cluster management
* MongoDB/DocumentDB - schema design, indexing, query optimization, aggregation pipelines

Nice to Have
* Experience with circuit breaker patterns (Hystrix, Resilience4j)
* Performance tuning at scale (JVM, thread pools, connection pools)
* Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (blue-green, canary)
* Contributions to internal tooling or developer experience improvements
* Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams

The pay range is the lowest to highest compensation we reasonably in good faith believe we would pay at posting for this role. We may ultimately pay more or less than this range. Employee pay is based on factors like relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, location, performance, union contract and business needs. This range may be modified in the future.

We offer comprehensive benefits including medical/dental/vision insurance, HSA, FSA, 401(k), and life, disability & ADD insurance to eligible employees. Salaried personnel receive paid time off. Hourly employees are not eligible for paid time off unless required by law. Hourly employees on a Service Contract Act project are eligible for paid sick leave.

Note: Pay is not considered compensation until it is earned, vested and determinable. The amount and availability of any compensation remains in Kforce's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified in its discretion consistent with the law.

This job is not eligible for bonuses, incentives or commissions.

Kforce is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran status, or disability status.

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