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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Java Engineer

💰 $90,000 - $160,000

Software EngineeringBackendJava

🎯 Role Definition

The Java Engineer is a backend-focused software developer who designs, builds, and maintains robust, scalable, and secure server-side applications using Java and related technologies. This role emphasizes clean architecture, test-driven development, microservices, cloud-native deployment, CI/CD automation, and cross-functional collaboration with product, QA, and DevOps teams. The Java Engineer will own features from design to production, optimize performance, and help maintain operational excellence and observability in high-traffic environments.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Java Developer with 1-3 years of backend experience
  • Backend Software Engineer familiar with REST APIs and databases
  • Full-stack Developer transitioning to backend specialization

Advancement To:

  • Senior Java Engineer / Staff Engineer (backend)
  • Technical Lead or Engineering Manager (Backend Services)
  • Principal Engineer / Architect focusing on distributed systems

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / SRE (with cloud and automation experience)
  • Platform Engineer (developer tooling and pipelines)
  • Data Engineer (if experienced with streaming and persistence)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and microservices using Java (Java 8+) following clean-code practices and object-oriented design principles to support high-throughput, low-latency applications.
  • Implement RESTful APIs and gRPC services with clear versioning, input validation, error handling, and strong backward compatibility strategies to support internal and external consumers.
  • Architect and implement microservice communication patterns (synchronous and asynchronous), leveraging message brokers such as Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ for event-driven processing and data streaming.
  • Build and maintain data persistence layers using relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/Oracle) and NoSQL stores (MongoDB, Cassandra), including schema design, indexing, query optimization, and transaction handling.
  • Lead performance tuning and profiling for JVM applications: heap/GC tuning, thread contention analysis, database query optimization, and end-to-end latency reduction.
  • Design and implement fault-tolerant, highly available systems with graceful degradation, circuit breakers, retries, and bulkhead isolation to meet SLOs and SLAs.
  • Drive test automation across unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end tests using JUnit, Mockito, TestContainers, and contract testing frameworks to ensure reliable releases.
  • Own CI/CD pipelines and release automation using Jenkins/GitLab CI/GitHub Actions, implementing automated build, test, and deployment workflows with rollback strategies.
  • Containerize applications with Docker and orchestrate deployments with Kubernetes, writing Helm charts or Kustomize manifests and configuring resource limits, probes, and autoscaling.
  • Integrate applications with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) leveraging managed services (RDS, ECS/EKS, Cloud SQL, IAM) and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
  • Implement secure coding practices and application security controls: authentication and authorization (OAuth2, JWT), input sanitization, encryption at rest/in transit, and regular vulnerability scanning.
  • Design and document system and API specifications, including sequence diagrams, component diagrams, and OpenAPI/Swagger documentation for developer consumption.
  • Participate in design and architecture reviews, provide technical estimates, and propose pragmatic trade-offs balancing speed, maintainability, and performance.
  • Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, pairing, and knowledge-sharing sessions, improving team standards for testing, observability, and design consistency.
  • Monitor production systems with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic) to detect anomalies, create alerts, and lead incident response and postmortems.
  • Collaborate closely with Product Managers and UX designers to translate business requirements into technical deliverables while identifying technical debt and refactoring opportunities.
  • Implement data migration strategies and schema evolution practices that ensure zero-downtime deployments for persistent stores and message topics.
  • Develop and maintain shared libraries, SDKs, and internal tools to streamline developer workflows and reduce duplicated effort across teams.
  • Ensure compliance with data governance and privacy requirements (GDPR, CCPA), including secure handling of PII and sensitive data flows.
  • Drive observability and logging best practices: structured logging, correlation IDs, tracing (OpenTelemetry/Jaeger), and centralized log aggregation to speed troubleshooting.
  • Participate in Agile/Scrum ceremonies, estimate work with story points, and help continuously improve team delivery processes and sprint outcomes.
  • Collaborate across teams to design integrations with third-party systems and external APIs, handling retries, rate limiting, and resilience patterns.
  • Lead capacity planning and cost optimization efforts for cloud-hosted Java workloads, recommending right-sizing, caching strategies, and lifecycle policies.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist in onboarding and training new engineers on codebase, services, and operational runbooks.
  • Create and maintain runbooks, playbooks, and deployment guides for common operational scenarios.
  • Conduct periodic security reviews and participate in vulnerability remediation efforts.
  • Help evaluate and prototype new technologies, frameworks, or architectural patterns to improve developer velocity and system reliability.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Java (Java 8+) — deep knowledge of the JVM, concurrency, memory model, and modern language features.
  • Spring Ecosystem (Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Data, Spring Security) for rapid service development.
  • RESTful API design and OpenAPI/Swagger documentation.
  • Microservices architecture patterns: service discovery, API gateways, circuit breakers, and distributed tracing.
  • Message-oriented middleware: Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar for event-driven architectures.
  • Relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle) and SQL performance tuning.
  • NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB) and appropriate use-cases.
  • Build and dependency management: Maven and Gradle.
  • Automated testing: JUnit, Mockito, TestContainers, integration and contract testing.
  • CI/CD and release engineering: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS).
  • Cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform with hands-on services (EC2/ECS/EKS, RDS, IAM).
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry.
  • Security fundamentals: OAuth2, JWT, TLS, OWASP Top 10 mitigation, secrets management.
  • Performance profiling tools and JVM tuning (GC logs, VisualVM, YourKit).
  • Infrastructure-as-code: Terraform, CloudFormation.
  • Messaging and integration patterns: event sourcing, CQRS, sagas.
  • Version control and collaboration: Git workflows, code review best practices.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking with attention to detail and systems-level perspective.
  • Clear and concise written and verbal communication skills for technical documentation and cross-functional collaboration.
  • Proactive ownership mentality: drive features from design through production and operational support.
  • Mentorship and coaching skills to lift team capability and establish engineering best practices.
  • Adaptability to evolving requirements and comfort working in fast-paced Agile environments.
  • Stakeholder empathy: ability to translate technical constraints for non-technical audiences and align on priorities.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance technical improvements, feature work, and incident response.
  • Collaborative mindset: works effectively with product, QA, security, and operations teams.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or relevant industry certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Developer, Oracle Java Certification).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Electrical Engineering (with software emphasis)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–8 years of professional backend software engineering experience (varies by seniority).

Preferred:

  • 5+ years building production-grade Java services, microservices experience, cloud-native deployments, and demonstrable work with observability and performance tuning.
  • Prior experience in highly available, distributed systems or high-throughput systems (finance, ad tech, e-commerce, SaaS).
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