Senior Backend Java and AWS Engineer

Job Title: Senior Backend Java and AWS Engineer Location: Chicago, IL 60603 (Onsite) Duration: 13 months contract Must Have Skills/Attributes:

• AWS
• Java
• Spring Boot
• SQL Experience Desired:
• Advanced Java and/or Kotlin in production environments (10 yrs)
• Strong AWS expertise (10 yrs)
• Spring Boot building microservices and REST APIs (10 yrs)
• Microservices architecture and distributed systems patterns (10 yrs)
• RESTful API design and implementation with documentation (10 yrs)
• SQL and relational databases (10 yrs)
• NoSQL non-relational data stores (10 yrs) Required Minimum Education: Bachelor’s Degree Job Description: Required Skills:
• Strong AWS expertise – designing and operating cloud-native, highly available distributed systems.
• Advanced Java and/or Kotlin in production environments.
• Spring Boot – building microservices and REST APIs (Spring Web/MVC, dependency injection, configuration, actuator/health checks).
• Microservices architecture and distributed systems patterns (service boundaries, resiliency, fault tolerance).
• RESTful API design and implementation with documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger).
• SQL and relational databases – data modeling, query tuning, performance optimization.
• NoSQL / non-relational data stores (e.g., DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra).
• CI/CD pipelines and build/deploy automation (quality gates, repeatable releases).
• Data streaming / asynchronous messaging – event-driven patterns (e.g., Kafka).
• Observability – logging, metrics, tracing, and production troubleshooting / incident investigation. Soft Skills (Must-Have):
• Strong technical communication skills – able to clearly explain complex designs and trade-offs to engineers, product owners, and managers.
• Collaborative mindset – ability to work effectively across teams on shared architectures and dependencies.
• Technical leadership and ownership – driving decisions and follow-through on complex engineering problems.
• Strong problem-solving 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 (stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives) while remaining primarily hands-on. Job Requirements:
• Provide deep technical leadership for the design and implementation of Java-based, cloud-native systems on AWS.
• Define service architecture, data flows, and integration patterns to meet strict scalability, availability, and security requirements.
• Drive architectural decisions across microservices, event-driven, and asynchronous processing patterns.
• Ensure clear service ownership and well-defined contracts between services.
• Define standards for infrastructure-as-code, resiliency, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation.
• Proactively identify architectural bottlenecks, scalability constraints, and technical debt.
• Lead development of core backend services using modern Java frameworks and AWS-native patterns.
• Design and implement RESTful and event-based APIs.
• Build message-driven processing and distributed data management solutions.
• Guide adoption of AWS services including managed compute, messaging, storage, and databases.
• Investigate and resolve defects, performance issues, and production incidents.
• Implement fixes and improvements to ensure system stability and reliability.
• Support reliable operation of distributed systems in production through observability, logging, metrics, and tracing.
• Review pull requests and lead technical design discussions.
• Define architecture and implementation standards for the team.
• Establish technical best practices for CI/CD automation, observability, and production troubleshooting.
• Work closely with the engineering team to guide design and implementation of Java-based services on AWS.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to align on APIs, integrations, and shared cloud architecture.
• Partner with Product Owners and engineering managers to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Align execution with delivery priorities.
• Participate in architecture reviews and integration discussions.
• Participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, and retrospectives.
• Attend necessary technical and operational calls.