Principal Java Engineer

Role: Principal Java Engineer

Location: Jersey City, NJ-Hybrid

Duration: 6+ months contract

ROLE_DESCRIPTION -

We are seeking a Principal Java Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership for the design, development, and modernization of large-scale enterprise applications. The role requires deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot, microservices and cloud-native engineering, along with the ability to define technical direction, solve complex engineering challenges, and mentor development teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for enterprise applications built using Java, Spring Boot and microservices architecture.
• Design scalable, resilient, secure, and high-performing distributed systems.
• Remain hands-on with architecture, design and critical code development, including code reviews and complex troubleshooting.
• Define engineering patterns, reusable frameworks, coding standards, and development best practices.
• Drive application modernization, including decomposition of legacy/monolithic applications into modern services.
• Design and integrate REST APIs, event-driven services and asynchronous processing using technologies such as Kafka.
• Lead technical decisions around APIs, data models, caching, resiliency, observability, and integration patterns.
• Work with Docker, Kubernetes and cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS to develop and deploy cloud-native applications.
• Drive engineering excellence across CI/CD, automated testing, security, performance and observability.
• Troubleshoot complex production and performance issues across application, database, integration, and infrastructure layers.
• Partner with architects, product owners, business teams and engineering leads to translate business requirements into effective technical solutions.
• Mentor senior engineers and developers and provide technical guidance across multiple development squads.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend pragmatic adoption based on business and engineering value.

Required Skills

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building enterprise Java applications.
• Expert-level knowledge of Java/JDK, Spring Framework, Spring Boot and Spring ecosystem.
• Strong experience with microservices and distributed systems architecture.
• Deep understanding of REST APIs, API design, integration patterns and event-driven architecture.
• Experience with Kafka or equivalent enterprise messaging/event-streaming platforms.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases such as Oracle, PostgreSQL or SQL Server; exposure to NoSQL platforms is desirable.
• Strong experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience developing applications on Azure, AWS or another major cloud platform.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD and DevSecOps, using platforms such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Maven or Gradle.
• Experience with automated testing frameworks including JUnit, Mockito and integration testing.
• Strong understanding of application security, authentication/authorization, resiliency, logging, monitoring and observability.
• Proven ability to perform code reviews, performance tuning, root-cause analysis and production troubleshooting.
• Strong technical leadership, communication and stakeholder-management skills.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with AKS/EKS, Terraform and infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience with Redis, MongoDB or other NoSQL technologies.
• Knowledge of OAuth 2.0, OIDC and enterprise IAM/security patterns.
• Experience with tools such as SonarQube, Dynatrace, Splunk, AppDynamics or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience modernizing complex legacy applications in banking, insurance or financial services.
• Exposure to Generative AI / AI-assisted software engineering and tools such as GitHub Copilot