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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Java Software Development Engineer

💰 $ - $

EngineeringSoftware DevelopmentJava

🎯 Role Definition

The Java Software Development Engineer (SDE) designs, builds, tests, deploys and maintains scalable, production-grade Java applications and microservices. This role owns end-to-end delivery of features using modern JVM technologies (Spring Boot, Spring Cloud), cloud-native platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD practices. The ideal candidate translates product requirements into robust, secure, high-performance code while collaborating with cross-functional product, QA and DevOps teams in an Agile environment.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Java Developer / Junior SDE working on backend services and APIs.
  • Software Engineer I with foundational Java, OOP and data structures experience.
  • Backend Developer focused on REST APIs, SQL and microservices.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Java Software Development Engineer / SDE II
  • Tech Lead / Lead Software Engineer owning modules and mentoring teams
  • Staff Engineer or Principal Engineer focusing on architecture and cross-team initiatives

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer (with cloud and automation focus)
  • Full-Stack Engineer (with expanded frontend responsibilities)
  • Data Engineer or Platform Engineer (with emphasis on streaming and storage)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement and maintain scalable, secure Java microservices using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud, ensuring services meet non-functional requirements for reliability, security, and performance in production environments.
  • Own the full software development lifecycle for assigned features: requirements analysis, design, coding, peer reviews, automated testing, CI/CD pipeline integration and production rollout with rollback strategies.
  • Architect and develop RESTful APIs and gRPC endpoints; define API contracts, versioning strategy and comprehensive API documentation to enable internal and external integrations.
  • Collaborate with product managers and UX designers to translate business requirements into technical specifications, solution designs and milestone-based delivery plans.
  • Implement and maintain high-quality unit, integration and contract tests using JUnit, Mockito, TestContainers and other testing frameworks to ensure regressions are caught early.
  • Contribute to and evolve microservices architecture patterns including service discovery, circuit breakers, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), retries and idempotency to improve system resilience.
  • Optimize application performance including JVM tuning, memory profiling, GC tuning, query optimization, and addressing latency bottlenecks in hot paths.
  • Integrate applications with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure) services such as S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Pub/Sub, SNS/SQS, IAM and secure key management.
  • Implement event-driven architectures using Kafka, RabbitMQ or other streaming platforms; design producers, consumers, partitions and offsets handling for reliability and throughput.
  • Containerize services using Docker and deploy to Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS) with appropriate pod design, health checks, resource limits and horizontal autoscaling.
  • Define and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI) with build, test, security scanning and automated deployment stages to multiple environments.
  • Drive observability adoption: build logging (structured logs), metrics (Prometheus), tracing and alerting (Grafana, ELK/EFK) to enable rapid troubleshooting and SLO-based monitoring.
  • Enforce secure coding practices: perform threat modeling, fix vulnerabilities reported by SAST/DAST tools, and implement secure authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT, mTLS).
  • Mentor and coach junior engineers on Java best practices, design patterns, concurrency, and clean code; lead code reviews and promote continuous improvement across the team.
  • Collaborate with QA and SRE teams to define staging environments, performance/load testing plans and runbooks for incident response and post-incident reviews.
  • Drive technical design reviews and contribute to architecture decision records (ADRs) to document choices, tradeoffs and long-term strategies for maintainability and scalability.
  • Implement database schema design and query optimization for relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra) stores, including migrations and data integrity checks.
  • Build robust CI stage rollbacks, blue/green or canary deployment strategies and feature flagging (LaunchDarkly, Unleash) to minimize risk during production releases.
  • Participate in capacity planning and cost optimization for cloud services, including analyzing spending patterns, rightsizing, and caching strategies to reduce latency and expense.
  • Ensure cross-team coordination on shared libraries, SDKs and platform components to avoid duplicated efforts and improve reusability across engineering teams.
  • Lead refactoring initiatives to modernize legacy Java codebases, remove technical debt, and introduce modularization, improved test coverage and clearer component boundaries.
  • Partner with security, compliance and legal teams to implement logging, audit trails and data protection controls required for regulatory requirements (GDPR, HIPAA as applicable).

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 new team members: create documentation, run walkthroughs, and provide coding workshops.
  • Research and recommend new JVM language features, libraries and cloud services to improve developer velocity and system reliability.
  • Help build internal developer tools and CI templates to accelerate safe service creation and deployment.
  • Participate in hiring interviews and candidate technical assessments for Java backend roles.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Java (8, 11, 17) — deep knowledge of the JVM, classloading, memory model, and modern language features (streams, lambdas, records).
  • Spring Framework ecosystem: Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Data, Spring Security and Spring Cloud for microservices.
  • Microservices architecture design, domain-driven design (DDD) principles and API-first development.
  • RESTful API design, OpenAPI/Swagger, versioning and contract testing.
  • Relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and ORMs (Hibernate/JPA), including schema migrations (Flyway, Liquibase).
  • NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB) and trade-offs between consistency and availability.
  • Message brokers and event streaming: Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kinesis; consumer offsets, partitioning and exactly-once/at-least-once patterns.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (pods, services, helm charts, operators).
  • Cloud platforms: AWS, GCP or Azure (compute, storage, managed DB, IAM) and cloud-native service integration.
  • CI/CD pipelines and tooling: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI; artifact repositories (Nexus, Artifactory).
  • Testing frameworks and TDD practices: JUnit, Mockito, AssertJ, TestContainers, integration and contract testing.
  • Performance profiling and monitoring: JVisualVM, YourKit, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, OpenTelemetry.
  • Build tools and dependency management: Maven, Gradle; repository and artifact management.
  • Version control & collaboration: Git, GitFlow/GitHub Flow, code review best practices.
  • Security fundamentals: OAuth2, JWT, TLS, secure secret management and static application security testing (SAST).
  • Concurrency, multithreading, thread pools, synchronization and lock-free data structures for high-throughput systems.
  • Data structures & algorithms, computational complexity, and problem-solving for optimized backend implementations.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Terraform, CloudFormation or Deployment Manager for reproducible environments.
  • Observability, logging standards, distributed tracing and SLO/SLAs definition and enforcement.

Soft Skills

  • Strong verbal and written communication to articulate technical decisions, write clear documentation and collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders.
  • Problem-solving mindset with ability to break down complex systems into maintainable components and actionable plans.
  • Ownership and accountability to drive features to production, follow-up on incidents and ensure customer satisfaction.
  • Mentorship and team leadership: coach junior engineers, lead design discussions and elevate team engineering practices.
  • Collaboration and empathy to work effectively with product managers, UX designers, QA, DevOps and business stakeholders.
  • Agile mindset: comfortable with iterative delivery, continuous improvement and sprint-based planning.
  • Time management and prioritization to balance maintenance, feature development and technical debt reduction.
  • Adaptability and willingness to learn new languages, platforms and architectural paradigms quickly.
  • Strategic thinking to align engineering decisions with business outcomes, cost optimization and long-term maintainability.
  • Attention to detail, code quality focus and a drive for high test coverage and reproducible builds.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering or related disciplines.
  • Certifications (optional): AWS Certified Developer/Architect, Oracle Java Certification, Kubernetes Certified Developer (CKAD), or relevant cloud certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Computer Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Applied Mathematics or related quantitative disciplines

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3 - 8+ years building backend systems with Java and cloud-native technologies.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of professional experience in Java backend development, with a strong track record of shipping production microservices.
  • Experience designing and operating services in cloud environments (AWS/GCP/Azure) and using container orchestration (Kubernetes).
  • Demonstrated experience with message-driven architectures (Kafka/RabbitMQ), performance tuning and production troubleshooting.
  • Prior mentorship or tech leadership experience and a portfolio of architectural improvements or cross-team initiatives.
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