Job Title: Lead Java Backend Engineer
Location: Chicago, IL Onsite office is required - Hybrid: 3x days in office
Duration: 12 months
The Lead Software Engineer will provide deep technical leadership for the design and implementation of Javabased, cloudnative systems on AWS, defining service architecture, data flows, and integration patterns to meet strict scalability, availability, and security requirements. This role will drive architectural decisions across microservices, eventdriven, and asynchronous processing patterns, ensuring clear service ownership and welldefined contracts.
The position will lead development of core backend services using modern Java frameworks and AWSnative patterns, including RESTful and eventbased APIs, messagedriven processing, and distributed data management. The Lead Engineer will guide adoption of AWS services such as managed compute, messaging, storage, and databases, and will define standards for infrastructureascode, resiliency, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation.
In addition, this role will establish technical best practices for CI/CD automation, observability, logging, metrics, and tracing to support reliable operation of distributed systems in production. By proactively identifying architectural bottlenecks, scalability constraints, and technical debt, the Lead Software Engineer will directly improve system performance, reliability, and longterm maintainability while enabling the work group to scale features and throughput efficiently.
Education & Experience Required: NO Degree required Must have 10+ years' experience as a PM At least 3+ years' experience in leading a team is preferred.
Required Technical Skills (Required) Strong AWS expertise, including designing and operating cloudnative, highly available distributed systems
Advanced Java and/or Kotlin in production environments
Spring Boot for building microservices and REST APIs (e.g., Spring Web/MVC, dependency injection, configuration, actuator/health checks)
Microservices architecture and distributed systems patterns (service boundaries, resiliency, fault tolerance)
RESTful API design & implementation, including documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger)
SQL + relational databases (data modeling, query tuning, performance)
NoSQL / nonrelational data stores (e.g., DynamoDB/MongoDB/Cassandra)
CI/CD and build/deploy automation (pipelines, quality gates, repeatable releases)
Data streaming / asynchronous messaging (eventdriven patterns; e.g., Kafka)
Observability & production troubleshooting (logging/metrics/tracing, incident investigation)
Soft Skills (Required)
Strong technical communication skills, able to clearly explain complex designs and tradeoffs to engineers, product owners, and managers
Collaborative mindset with the ability to work effectively across teams on shared architectures and dependencies
Technical leadership and ownership, driving decisions and followthrough on complex engineering problems
Problemsolving 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 and technical discussions while remaining primarily handson
Never miss an opportunity! Create an alert based on the job you applied for.
