Top 5 Technical Skills:
- AWS architecture and development
- Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
- Enterprise Email SME — deliverability, DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and sender reputation
- Lead-level Java / Spring Boot development
- Strong experience presenting technical details to Stakeholders
Top 3 Soft Skills:
- Strong technical leadership
- Takes ownership and responsibility for the solution and drives work to completion
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Lead Developer – Enterprise Email Platform / AWS SES
Position Summary
We are seeking a Lead Developer / Email Platform SME to lead the design and development of a new enterprise-scale email and messaging platform built primarily on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This individual will serve as the technical lead for the solution and must bring deep, hands-on expertise with Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), enterprise email delivery, sender reputation management, DNS/email authentication, and high-volume transactional communications.
This is not simply an application development position. The successful candidate must understand the complete email delivery lifecycle—from application-generated communication requests through domain authentication, routing, delivery, bounce/complaint handling, reputation monitoring, and operational support.
The platform will use AWS SES with supporting application services developed primarily in Java and Spring Boot.
The Lead Developer will be expected to take ownership of the solution, provide technical direction to other developers, work directly with architects and business stakeholders, and remain hands-on throughout design and implementation.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the technical design and development of an enterprise email and messaging platform using AWS SES and related AWS services.
- Serve as the project's Email Subject Matter Expert, establishing enterprise email architecture, standards, and best practices.
- Design and implement highly scalable services for generating, processing, routing, and delivering transactional and enrollment-related email communications.
- Lead the implementation and configuration of Amazon SES, including:
- Verified domains and sending identities
- Configuration sets
- Dedicated IP strategy where applicable
- Sending pools and traffic segmentation
- Bounce and complaint processing
- Suppression management
- Delivery event tracking
- Reputation monitoring
- Sending quotas and production readiness
- Own the email domain authentication strategy, including:
- SPF
- DKIM
- DMARC
- DNS configuration and validation
- Return-Path / MAIL FROM configuration
- Domain alignment
- Sender authentication and deliverability
- Establish and maintain strong email sender reputation and deliverability across major mailbox providers.
- Design mechanisms for identifying and responding to hard bounces, soft bounces, complaints, suppression events, and delivery failures.
- Develop Java/Spring Boot services and APIs supporting email generation, communication requests, processing, routing, and delivery.
- Design and implement integration between application components and AWS messaging services.
- Support both individual and batch communication processing for high-volume enterprise workloads.
- Develop reusable communication services supporting templates, variables, merge fields, business rules, branding, and document/email routing.
- Participate in the design of template management and communication-builder capabilities.
- Implement services capable of accepting structured communication requests, including XML/JSON and application-generated requests.
- Design asynchronous, resilient processing patterns for large-volume email workloads.
- Implement event-driven processing for email delivery events and status updates.
- Integrate email delivery events into application databases, dashboards, reporting, reconciliation, and operational monitoring.
- Design for reliability, fault tolerance, scalability, security, monitoring, and operational supportability.
- Establish logging, tracing, alerting, and production support standards for the platform.
- Review designs and code produced by other developers and provide hands-on technical leadership.
- Troubleshoot complex application, AWS, DNS, messaging, and email-deliverability issues.
- Work closely with architects, infrastructure teams, security teams, product owners, and business stakeholders.
- Take ownership of technical decisions and drive work through implementation and production deployment.
Required Technical Experience
Email / Messaging Expertise
- Extensive hands-on experience designing or supporting enterprise email platforms.
- Expert-level knowledge of Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).
- Strong understanding of enterprise transactional email and high-volume email-delivery architectures.
- Demonstrated experience managing and protecting sender and domain reputation.
- Expert knowledge of email authentication and DNS technologies including:
- SPF
- DKIM
- DMARC
- DNS
- MX records
- CNAME records
- TXT records
- Custom MAIL FROM / Return-Path
- Domain alignment
- Strong understanding of:
- Hard and soft bounces
- Complaint handling
- Suppression lists
- Feedback loops
- Spam filtering
- Throttling
- Deliverability monitoring
- Reputation management
- IP/domain warm-up strategies
- Experience troubleshooting deliverability issues involving major mailbox providers and enterprise email gateways.
AWS
Strong hands-on AWS experience, particularly with services supporting scalable messaging and application platforms, including:
- Amazon SES
- AWS messaging/SMS capabilities
- Amazon SNS and/or event-driven messaging
- Amazon S3
- AWS database services
- AWS monitoring and logging services
- IAM and AWS security practices
Experience designing event-driven or asynchronous AWS architectures is strongly preferred.
Java / Application Development
- Extensive hands-on Java development experience.
- Strong Spring Boot development experience.
- Experience designing and building REST APIs and enterprise application services.
- Experience developing high-volume, asynchronous, and batch-processing applications.
- Strong understanding of:
- Microservices
- API design
- JSON/XML processing
- Application integration
- Queuing and messaging
- Retry and exception-processing patterns
- Database integration
- Logging and monitoring
- Ability to remain hands-on in development while providing technical leadership to the broader team.
Technical Leadership
The successful candidate must operate as a true technical lead rather than simply a senior individual contributor.
Responsibilities include:
- Owning the technical solution.
- Making architecture and implementation decisions.
- Establishing development standards and best practices.
- Providing direction and mentorship to developers.
- Conducting design and code reviews.
- Identifying technical risks before they become project issues.
- Driving technical issues to resolution without requiring constant direction.
- Coordinating across development, infrastructure, security, architecture, and business teams.
- Clearly communicating technical issues, alternatives, risks, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Ideal Candidate
The ideal candidate has previously built, modernized, or served as the technical owner of a large-scale enterprise transactional email platform.
They understand that successful email delivery involves substantially more than calling an email API. They understand DNS, authentication, reputation, deliverability, bounce and complaint management, monitoring, throttling, operational support, and the application architecture surrounding the email platform.
This individual should be equally comfortable discussing DMARC alignment and SES reputation metrics with an infrastructure engineer, designing a Spring Boot service with developers, reviewing an AWS architecture with an architect, and explaining platform risks or design decisions to business leadership.
Contact Information:
Please contact me for all of the details of the client company, environment, and the position. I look forward to speaking with you.
Zach Lutman
