Java Delivery Onsite Project Lead at Austin, TX

Job Title: Java Delivery Onsite Project Lead

Designation: Java onsite lead

Location: Austin, TX

Salary: $120K - $130K

Job Summary

We are seeking a hands-on Java Technical Lead to serve as the onsite anchor between our client and offshore engineering team. This is a dual-role position: you will continue to write and review production-grade code while leading design, planning, and delivery. The ideal candidate is a strong Java engineer who can architect resilient, scalable systems, modernize legacy applications, and communicate fluently with both technical and business stakeholders. You will own technical quality, mentor the offshore team, and ensure delivery aligns with client expectations on scope, timeline, and craftsmanship.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and review high-quality Java/Spring Boot code; remain hands-on as the most senior engineer on the ground.
• Translate complex client requirements into clear technical designs and implementation plans for the onsite-offshore team.
• Lead and contribute to design reviews, sprint planning, backlog grooming, and story-writing sessions.
• Analyze legacy systems and drive their modernization using current architecture, patterns, and tooling.
• Architect resilient, fault-tolerant distributed systems with robust error handling and recovery, including Spring Batch pipelines.
• Define and enforce engineering best practices, coding standards, and review discipline across the team.
• Act as primary technical point of contact for the client; manage stakeholder expectations and communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly.
• Coordinate work between onsite and offshore teams, ensuring smooth handoffs, knowledge transfer, and consistent delivery cadence.
• Identify and mitigate technical and delivery risks proactively.
• Maintain project artifacts design docs, architecture diagrams, runbooks, and decision records.
• Champion the responsible use of AI tools and coding agents to accelerate development, code review, and comprehension of legacy/complex codebases.

Mandatory Skills

• Core Java: Strong fundamentals, OOP, JVM/Java memory model, garbage collection, and multithreading/concurrency.
• Spring Boot: Deep, production-level experience building RESTful services.
• Spring Batch: Batch processing, chunk-oriented design, restartability, and robust error handling.
• Databases: Strong relational/database concepts and advanced SQL; query optimization.
• System Design: Ability to understand complex systems and design scalable, resilient architectures using proven design patterns.
• Messaging/Queueing: Practical experience with Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent.
• Security & Authentication: Solid understanding of application security and authentication/authorization mechanisms JWT, OAuth 2.0, token-based exchange, and role-based access control (RBAC); securing REST APIs and managing identity flows.
• Cloud: Hands-on experience building and deploying on a major cloud platform (AWS or Google Cloud Platform).
• Engineering practices: Code review leadership, testing, and clean-code discipline.
• Communication: Excellent client-facing and stakeholder-management skills; able to lead design reviews, sprint planning, grooming, and story writing.
• Legacy modernization: Ability to understand legacy systems and re-architect them with modern tooling.
• AI-assisted engineering: Proficiency using AI tools and coding agents for development, code review, and reverse-engineering existing functionality.

Preferred Skills

• Google Cloud Platform experience is a strong plus.
• Agile/Scrum delivery and tooling (JIRA, Confluence, or similar).
• Solid grasp of full SDLC processes and DevOps/CI-CD fundamentals.
• Experience managing onsite-offshore delivery models and stakeholder relationships.
• Familiarity with containerization and microservices deployment strategies.
• Understanding of mainframe systems is a plus (e.g., COBOL, JCL, DB2), particularly for legacy modernization efforts.
• Frontend exposure with Angular and HTML is a plus for full-stack collaboration.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• Demonstrated track record leading complex Java projects from design through delivery.
• Cloud, Agile, or architecture certifications (e.g., AWS/Google Cloud Platform, Scrum Master) are a plus.