Senior Forward Deployment Engineer (Jersey City)

Project Description

The project is focused on improving the security, release reliability, maintainability, and operational resilience of business-critical banking applications.

Forward Deployed Engineers will conduct targeted, hands-on engagements with development teams that are facing challenges with vulnerability remediation, automated testing, legacy technology, production stability, or achieving a safe and rapid release cadence.

The role combines senior software engineering, DevOps, SRE, test automation, application security, and legacy modernization. Approximately 70% of the work involves hands-on coding and configuration.

The technical scope includes building effective automated test suites, remediating security vulnerabilities, performing dependency and reachability analysis, upgrading Java and NPM runtimes, modernizing Spring and legacy middleware applications, improving CI/CD pipelines, containerizing applications, automating deployments, and introducing standard observability and resilience patterns.

The Expert FDE is expected to lead complex engagements, work directly with development and client stakeholders, define the technical remediation approach, implement critical changes personally, and enable client teams to maintain the improved engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate directly with development teams to identify and resolve issues related to testing, security, release, deployment, resilience, and legacy technologies.
• Review application code, dependencies, test coverage, runtime configurations, deployment processes, logs, monitoring systems, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Write, debug, test, review, and enhance production application code and configurations.
• Develop and maintain automated unit, integration, component, regression, and deployment smoke tests.
• Apply Test-Driven Development practices and select appropriate testing approaches with guidance as needed.
• Source test data and apply masking techniques to protect sensitive information in lower environments.
• Investigate vulnerabilities and dependency risks, identify root causes, implement secure remediation, and conduct regression testing.
• Upgrade Java/JVM or NPM runtimes, Spring components, libraries, dependencies, base images, operating systems, and installed software.
• Assist in implementing automated and continuous dependency updates using Renovate or comparable tools.
• Support modernization efforts for legacy applications and middleware stacks, including WebSphere or WebLogic when applicable.
• Containerize applications using Docker and deploy or support them on OpenShift platforms.
• Enhance Git workflows, branch management, pull requests, and code-review processes.
• Implement and improve CI/CD pipelines, automated quality gates, deployment validation, and rollback procedures.
• Automate database changes using Liquibase or similar migration tools.
• Support application and environment automation through Ansible or equivalent tools.
• Apply secure coding patterns and adhere to standards for secrets management, authentication, authorization, and handling sensitive data.
• Improve structured logging, exception handling, health checks, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and operational alerts.
• Support highly available and resilient deployment strategies.
• Troubleshoot production and non-production issues using code analysis, SQL, logs, metrics, traces, and diagnostic tools.
• Communicate progress, risks, technical decisions, blockers, and dependencies to engineering, security, architecture, operations, project management, and client stakeholders.
• Document implemented solutions and facilitate knowledge transfer to development and support teams.
• Own a defined technical workstream from assessment and implementation through testing, deployment, and stabilization.

Mandatory Skills Description

The role requires strong professional software engineering expertise, typically spanning 4–7 years , including recent hands-on development of production applications. The candidate must actively write and debug code, with recent experience directly involving production code or configuration changes made within the last 12–18 months .

Hard skills include:

• Advanced Java and JVM development, with strong TypeScript skills valued for Node.js environments.
• Practical experience with Spring or similar enterprise frameworks.
• Proficiency in Test-Driven Development, automated testing, and familiarity with multiple test frameworks and automation approaches.
• Capability to develop unit and integration tests and support deployment smoke testing.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated builds, quality gates, and application deployments.
• Knowledge of secure coding practices and experience addressing application vulnerabilities.
• Experience upgrading runtimes, frameworks, libraries, dependencies, and operating systems.
• Familiarity with Docker and containerized application delivery.
• Working knowledge of OpenShift, Kubernetes, or comparable container platforms.
• Competence in Linux command-line tools and production troubleshooting.
• Experience with build tools such as Maven, Gradle, or npm.
• Strong Git and source control practices, including branching, pull requests, and code reviews.
• Skills in troubleshooting applications using SQL, logs, metrics, traces, stack traces, and monitoring tools.
• Understanding of observability concepts, structured logging, exception handling, health checks, and production support.
• Knowledge of transactions, retries, idempotency, rollback, resilience, and distributed system failure patterns.

Soft skills include:

• Ability to independently manage a defined technical workstream from analysis through production deployment.
• Effective communication with stakeholders and collaboration with development, security, operations, architecture, and project management teams.
• Willingness and ability to rapidly learn new applications, tools, and technology stacks.
• Responsible use of AI coding tools to enhance software engineering and testing productivity.

Nice-to-Have Skills Description

• Experience with OpenShift or enterprise Kubernetes environments, demonstrating familiarity with container orchestration platforms.
• Experience modernizing applications deployed on WebSphere, WebLogic, or other legacy application servers, indicating skills in updating and migrating legacy systems.
• Experience upgrading Java, Spring, Spring Boot, Node.js, NPM, or other application runtime stacks, reflecting knowledge of maintaining and advancing software frameworks.
• Experience with Renovate, Dependabot, or similar automated dependency-update tools, showing capability in managing software dependencies efficiently.
• Experience with Software Composition Analysis, CVE evaluation, reachability analysis, or transitive-dependency remediation, indicating awareness of software security and vulnerability management.
• Experience with Liquibase, Flyway, or similar database migration tools, demonstrating proficiency in managing database schema changes.
• Experience with Ansible or other infrastructure and software automation tools, reflecting skills in automating IT operations.
• Experience in TypeScript, Node.js, and npm development, indicating programming expertise in these technologies.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Splunk, ELK, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, AppDynamics, or Dynatrace, showing ability to implement and utilize system monitoring solutions.
• Experience with test-data generation, test-data management, or masking of sensitive data, demonstrating knowledge of data privacy and testing practices.
• Experience with high-availability, hot-hot, active-active, multi-region, or cross-datacenter architectures, indicating familiarity