Lead Java Developer

Position Title: Lead Java Developer

Location: Strongsville, OH and Pittsburgh, PA

Ability to work remote: 5 days onsite.

Acceptable time zone(s): EST

Days of the week: M-F 40 hours

Working Hours: M-F 8-5 EST

OT: Yes, possible

Intended length of Assignment: 12/31/2026

Contract to hire W2

Function of the Group/Initiatives/Projects: We are part of a data platform in retail. DSP-COE

Industry background: Finance/Banking a plus, open to other backgrounds

Team Dynamic: Business analysts and testing teams at least nine on team that will be joining, team in GCC offshore and interact with the different businesses.

Roles/Responsibilities:

Must have:

• Multiple years of experience in software development with strong focus on Java / J2EE technologies.
• Proven experience in programming JAVA based microservices, Kafka, Kstreams, Configuration and Optimization.
• Strong knowledge of Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, REST APIs.
• Hands-on experience writing queries with Oracle.
• Good understanding of containerization technologies like OCP, Docker, Kubernetes
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git, Jenkins, and automated testing tools.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to lead technical teams.
• Provides technical guidance and support to colleagues and solution development.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with event-driven architecture, messaging systems like Kafka.
• Exposure to SAFE Agile/Scrum methodologies.
• Understanding of Kafka architecture (brokers, partitions, topics, producers, consumers)
• Experience with Kafka Producers and Consumers using the Kafka Java client
• Distributed Processing Concepts (Just a high level)
• Integration with External Systems
• Connecting Kafka Streams with databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra)
• Using Kafka Connect for external data integration
• Knowledge of REST APIs and how to expose data from Kafka Streams
• Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes for containerized deployment, OpenShift
• Using CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI)
• Logging and tracing using ELK (Elasticsearch) or OpenTelemetry (High level understanding)
• Experience building REST APIs using Spring Boot, Spring Data and reading from databases via APIs
• Monitoring ( Dynatrace) and Optimization, Kafka Streams metrics (through JMX, Grafana, Prometheus)

Must have skills:

Years of experience: at least 8 years Software development

• Expert Java & J2EE
• Kafka & Kafka Streams, Mappers
• Microservices architecture
• Spring Framework (Spring Boot, Spring Cloud)
• REST API development
• Configuration management & performance optimization
• Oracle & SQL
• Container platforms (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift/OCP)
• CI/CD & DevOps tooling (pipelines, Git, Jenkins)
• Automated testing tools

Flex Skills:

• Jira
• ServiceNow
• Confluence

Education: Bachelor’s or relevant experience will be considered

Role Differentiator: Growth, Opportunity, modern technologies

Interview Process: Virtual interviews

• 1st with manager, initial screen ~30 minutes
• 2nd round with technical team (panel) ~45min -1 hour
• Possibility to 3rd round if needing further assessment