Senior/Lead Java Developer

Location/Remote: Hybrid in Westminster, CO, 80030 (3 days per week onsite).

Employment Type: 6-month Contract (W-2 or 1099/IC) — extensions expected

Compensation: Up to $83/hour W-2 or up to $92/hour 1099/IC (depending on experience)

Benefits: Medical, LTD/STD, HSA/FSA, term life, supplemental health insurance options, 401(k) available for W-2 employees (including family coverage if needed).

This Senior/Lead Java Developer role focuses on designing, building, and operating backend services that support scalable, cloud-hosted platforms. Success in this role means delivering reliable Java microservices, making sound architectural decisions, and providing technical leadership that raises code quality and execution across the team. You will help drive designs from concept through production, with a strong emphasis on maintainability, security, and performance.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and delivery of Java-based microservices, from architecture through implementation, testing, and production support.
• Build and maintain cloud services on AWS, including deployment automation, observability, and cost-aware scalability.
• Drive technical direction for service boundaries, resilience patterns, data contracts, and integration approaches across distributed systems.
• Develop REST APIs and backend services with clear versioning strategies, backward compatibility, and reliability SLAs.
• Implement event-driven patterns using streaming and messaging approaches to enable scalable, decoupled workflows.
• Conduct design and code reviews, establish engineering standards, and mentor engineers to improve overall delivery quality.
• Troubleshoot production issues by analyzing logs, metrics, and traces; drive root-cause resolution and corrective actions to closure.
• Partner with product, security, and operations stakeholders to scope work, estimate effort, and deliver incremental releases aligned to priorities.

Required Skills:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience delivering production backend systems.
• Strong Java development experience, including building maintainable, testable, and performant services.
• Experience designing and building microservices architectures, including service decomposition and inter-service communication patterns.
• Hands-on cloud experience with AWS, including deploying and operating services in a production environment.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through architecture guidance, mentoring, and ownership of engineering outcomes.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with Spring Framework and building services using common Java ecosystem tooling and patterns.
• Experience building REST APIs and SaaS backend services, including authentication/authorization and API lifecycle management.
• Experience with event-driven architecture and streaming systems, including asynchronous workflows and message-driven integration.
• Experience with serverless architecture and selecting appropriate compute patterns for scale and cost.
• Experience with API design and documentation practices, including OpenAPI and/or AsyncAPI.