Software Engineer Lead

Software Engineer Lead

Location: Strongsville, OH, 44136 or Pittsburgh, PA, 15222 Length of Assignment: 6 Months Contract to Hire role Pay Rate: $70 to 80/hr. on W2 ONLY 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. Roles/Responsibilities: 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 Required: At least 8 years Software development: 1. Expert Java & J2EE, 2. Kafka & Kafka Streams, Mappers, 3. Microservices architecture, 4. Spring Framework (Spring Boot, Spring Cloud) 5. REST API development, 6. Configuration management & performance optimization, 7. Oracle & SQL, 8. Container platforms (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift/OCP), 9. CI/CD & DevOps tooling (pipelines, Git, Jenkins), 10. Automated testing tools Flex Skills: 1. Jira, 2. ServiceNow, 3. Confluence Education: Bachelor's Degree or relevant experience will be considered 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. Shortlisting Stack Ranking (Most Important to Least Important): 1. Skills 2. Location 3. Rate 4. Former Client Exp.