Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Java Programmer

💰 $65,000 - $140,000

DevelopmentSoftware EngineeringJavaBackend

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced Java Programmer to design, build, test, and maintain high-quality, scalable backend systems. The ideal candidate is a hands-on Java developer with a strong command of the JVM ecosystem (Java 8+), proven experience with Spring/Spring Boot, microservices architecture, RESTful APIs, persistence frameworks (JPA/Hibernate), and modern DevOps toolchains (Docker, CI/CD). This role requires active collaboration with product managers, frontend engineers, QA, and operations to deliver resilient, performant services that meet business requirements.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Java Developer / Graduate Java Engineer
  • Software Developer Intern with Java experience
  • Backend Engineer (other languages transitioning to Java)

Advancement To:

  • Senior Java Developer / Senior Backend Engineer
  • Tech Lead / Team Lead (Java services)
  • Software Architect / Principal Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Full-Stack Developer (Java + modern frontend)
  • Cloud Engineer (Java services on AWS/GCP/Azure)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain Java-based services and libraries using modern Java (Java 8+) and frameworks such as Spring Boot and Spring Framework, ensuring code quality, performance, and maintainability.
  • Develop RESTful APIs and backend endpoints following API design best practices, versioning strategies, and clear request/response contracts for internal and partner integrations.
  • Architect and implement microservices-based solutions, including service decomposition, inter-service communication patterns, and resilience patterns (circuit breakers, bulkhead, retries).
  • Build and maintain data access layers using JPA/Hibernate, optimize queries, and collaborate with DBAs to ensure transactional integrity and performant persistence strategies across relational and NoSQL stores.
  • Write comprehensive unit, integration, and API-level automated tests using JUnit, Mockito, Testcontainers, and other testing frameworks to ensure reliability and regression safety.
  • Participate in architecture and design discussions; produce design documents, sequence diagrams, and technical proposals that align with product goals and non-functional requirements (scalability, availability, security).
  • Troubleshoot production incidents, perform root cause analysis, and implement long-term fixes; actively participate in on-call rotations when applicable to ensure 24/7 service reliability.
  • Optimize application performance through profiling, JVM tuning, GC tuning, caching strategies, and load testing; implement improvements that reduce latency and resource usage.
  • Implement secure coding practices: validate and sanitize inputs, enforce authentication/authorization patterns, manage secrets securely, and work with security teams to remediate vulnerabilities.
  • Integrate with messaging and streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS SNS/SQS) to build event-driven, asynchronous workflows and ensure at-least-once or exactly-once processing as required.
  • Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) to automate build, test, and deployment processes; enable fast, reliable delivery to staging and production environments.
  • Containerize applications using Docker and collaborate with platform teams to deploy and operate containers on orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, EKS, GKE, AKS).
  • Implement observability: add structured logging, metrics (Prometheus, Micrometer), distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Zipkin, Jaeger), and dashboards to monitor application health and SLIs/SLOs.
  • Ensure backward compatibility and data migration strategies when evolving API contracts or database schemas; write safe migration scripts and runbook procedures.
  • Review code and provide constructive feedback through code reviews, focusing on design, security, readability, and test coverage to raise team-wide engineering standards.
  • Mentor and coach junior developers on Java best practices, clean code, testing strategies, and system design fundamentals to improve overall team capability.
  • Estimate development tasks, decompose large features into manageable stories, and deliver features on schedule while balancing technical debt and product priorities.
  • Collaborate with product managers, UX, QA, and operations to translate product requirements into technical tasks and deliverables that meet business and user needs.
  • Maintain and update technical documentation including API specs (OpenAPI/Swagger), runbooks, architecture diagrams, and developer onboarding guides.
  • Drive continuous improvement by proposing tooling, process, or architectural changes to increase developer productivity and operational stability.
  • Implement data protection and compliance controls relevant to the domain (PII handling, encryption at rest/in transit), and collaborate with legal/compliance teams when required.
  • Evaluate and adopt new JVM libraries, frameworks, and patterns following proof-of-concept cycles to improve development velocity and system robustness.

Secondary Functions

  • Participate in sprint planning, backlog grooming, and agile ceremonies to prioritize work and align engineering efforts with roadmap objectives.
  • Support incident post-mortems and contribute to a blameless culture of continuous learning and operational excellence.
  • Assist in onboarding new engineers by providing environment setup assistance, pairing sessions, and walkthroughs of core services.
  • Contribute to open-source or internal shared libraries that improve cross-team reuse and maintainability.
  • Collaborate with QA to define acceptance criteria and automate end-to-end scenarios where feasible.
  • Communicate status, risks, and technical trade-offs clearly to stakeholders and leadership to enable informed decisions.
  • Engage in capacity planning and cost optimization for cloud-hosted Java workloads, recommending optimizations that reduce infrastructure spend.
  • Stay current with Java ecosystem updates, security advisories, and industry trends; proactively recommend upgrades or patches.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Java (Java 8, 11, 17) — deep knowledge of language features, concurrency, memory model, and JVM internals.
  • Spring Framework / Spring Boot — dependency injection, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Data.
  • RESTful API design and OpenAPI/Swagger specification authoring.
  • Microservices architecture patterns — service discovery, API gateways, circuit breakers, and distributed transactions.
  • Persistence technologies: JPA/Hibernate, SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL), and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra).
  • Message brokers and streaming: Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS messaging services.
  • Unit and integration testing: JUnit, Mockito, AssertJ, Testcontainers.
  • Build and dependency management: Maven, Gradle.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (kubectl, Helm).
  • CI/CD pipelines and automation: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent.
  • Version control: Git (branching strategies, pull requests, code reviews).
  • Observability and monitoring: Logging frameworks (Logback/SLF4J), Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry.
  • Cloud platforms and services: AWS / GCP / Azure (EC2/EKS, IAM, RDS, S3, Cloud SQL).
  • Performance profiling and tuning: JVM profilers, GC tuning, thread dumps, latency analysis.
  • Security best practices: OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, encryption, OWASP Top 10 mitigation techniques.

Soft Skills

  • Strong verbal and written communication for cross-functional collaboration and technical documentation.
  • Problem-solving and analytical thinking to debug complex distributed systems and identify root causes.
  • Ownership and accountability: drive tasks to completion and follow through with stakeholders.
  • Team leadership and mentorship: coach junior engineers and help grow team capabilities.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: quickly adopt new tools, patterns, and changing requirements.
  • Time management and prioritization under competing deadlines.
  • Customer-centric mindset: build features and fixes that address business and user needs.
  • Collaborative mindset: work effectively in cross-functional agile teams and contribute to healthy team dynamics.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline — or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent advanced certifications (Oracle Java certification, AWS Certified Developer, etc.).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Mathematics / Applied Mathematics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–8 years of professional experience developing Java-based applications; mid-level roles often expect 3–5 years.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of backend engineering experience with production-grade microservices, cloud deployments, CI/CD automation, and hands-on experience owning services end-to-end. Experience in high-throughput, low-latency systems or regulated industries (finance, healthcare) is a plus.
Explore More Careers