Backend Java Devops Engineer

Hi,

I am Ayushi from The Tilted Circle reaching out to you for below role.

If interested, please share your resume, work visa status, current location and contact details.

Position: Backend Software Engineer (w/ DevOps)

Location: Richfield, MN (Hybrid)

Duration: 6+ Months Contract

Interview: F2F/In Person

GC-EAD on W2

The hiring manager is looking for a Backend Software Engineer with strong DevOps expertise to join an enterprise platform engineering team responsible for building and maintaining critical infrastructure services used across many engineering teams.
This team owns core platform services such as API gateways and OAuth token services, meaning their work impacts multiple applications across the organization. Because of this, the environment requires high reliability, strong security practices, and heavy automation.
The engineer will focus on building, deploying, and operating platform services, ensuring systems are secure, automated, observable, and scalable.
The manager emphasized that this is a high-impact engineering team — mistakes in this environment could impact company-wide services — so the team prioritizes strong engineering discipline, collaboration, and code quality practices.
The role blends DevOps infrastructure work with backend development, meaning the candidate should be comfortable managing cloud platforms and Kubernetes environments while also contributing to Java/Spring Boot backend projects.

Team & Environment

• Team size: 5 engineers
• Works within a larger domain with multiple engineering squads
• Other squads include:
• Solution design
• Frontend development
• Support / ticket resolution teams

This specific team focuses on:

• Backend platform services
• Infrastructure and DevOps
• API security and platform reliability

The team works very collaboratively, often using:

• Pair programming
• Strong code reviews
• Shared ownership of features

No individual owns a feature alone — two engineers are responsible for each work item.

Core Responsibilities

The engineer will:

• Build and operate platform services
• Deploy and manage applications in Kubernetes environments
• Support API gateway infrastructure and OAuth token services
• Contribute to Java and Spring Boot development
• Ensure secure API implementations
• Automate deployments and infrastructure
• Support operational needs of owned services

Key focus areas include:

• Automation
• Platform reliability
• Security
• Traceability of deployments

Required Technical Skills

The manager strongly emphasized the following core technologies:

Core Stack

• Kubernetes
• Helm / Helm Charts
• Java
• Spring Boot
• AWS Cloud

Security Knowledge

• API Security
• OAuth flows
• Secure API design

Candidates should understand cloud infrastructure from both:

• Platform perspective
• Infrastructure perspective

Preferred / Nice-to-Have Skills

DevOps / Platform Tools

• CI/CD pipelines
• GitOps
• Infrastructure as Code
• Terraform
• CloudFormation

API Platform Experience

• API Gateway
• API Management

Observability

• Monitoring / logging tools

Other

• On-call readiness
• Experience with enterprise systems

The manager mentioned that tool-specific experience is less important than understanding the domain, since engineers can adapt to different tools.

AWS Skills (Nice-to-Have)

Specific AWS knowledge that would help:

• EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)

However, if a candidate understands Kubernetes well, they should be able to adapt to EKS.

DevOps vs Software Engineering Balance

This is not a pure DevOps role.

Initially:

• More focus on DevOps / infrastructure setup

Long term:

• Engineers will also contribute to Java backend development

The manager described the team as a Java shop, so DevOps engineers must still be comfortable contributing to code.

Work Environment

Hybrid Schedule

Employees should work onsite:

Tuesday – Wednesday – Thursday

Remote on other days.

For the first few weeks, the manager prefers candidates come onsite consistently to ramp up.

On-Call Support

• The team is Level 4 support
• On-call rotation exists
• Overnight coverage handled by offshore support teams
• Engineers only get involved for major incidents

So operational burden is relatively limited.

Engineering Culture

The manager strongly emphasized collaborative engineering practices:

• Pair programming is standard
• Strong code reviews
• Shared ownership of tasks
• Engineers accountable for quality together

Every story or task is owned by two engineers.

Interview Process

Round 1 — Manager Screening

Duration: 20–30 minutes
Format: Video call

Focus:

• Resume walkthrough
• Candidate background
• General technical discussion

Round 2 — Onsite Interview (1.5 hours)

Part 1 – Coding Exercise (30 minutes)

• Java coding problem
• Focus on problem-solving approach
• Not extremely difficult questions

Part 2 – Technical Panel (45–60 minutes)

Interviewers:

• Team engineers
• Principal engineer

Focus areas:

• DevOps knowledge
• Kubernetes
• Java / Spring Boot
• Cloud infrastructure
• API security

Key Candidate Profile (What the Manager Really Wants)

• Backend engineer with strong DevOps exposure
• Experience with Kubernetes-based platforms
• Comfortable coding in Java / Spring Boot
• Knowledge of API security
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS)
• Collaborative mindset
• Comfortable with enterprise-scale systems