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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Java Technical Lead

💰 $ - $

EngineeringSoftware DevelopmentJava

🎯 Role Definition

The Java Technical Lead is a hands-on engineering leader responsible for designing, building, and operating scalable Java-based systems. This role blends architecture, coding, and people leadership: you will define technical direction, mentor engineers, enforce engineering best practices, and partner with product and operations to deliver high-quality software on time. The ideal Java Technical Lead has deep expertise in Java and Spring ecosystem, experience with cloud-native microservices, and a proven track record of leading cross-functional teams to production.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Java Developer / Senior Software Engineer
  • Tech Lead / Lead Developer
  • Software Architect (mid-level)

Advancement To:

  • Engineering Manager / Manager of Software Engineering
  • Principal Engineer / Staff Engineer
  • Solutions Architect / Head of Platform

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / Cloud Platform Lead
  • Data Engineering Lead
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect and design robust, secure, and maintainable Java-based systems and microservices using Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, or equivalent frameworks, ensuring clear module boundaries and API contracts.
  • Lead end-to-end development for complex features: translate product requirements into technical specifications, create high-quality designs, and drive delivery timelines while balancing technical debt and business needs.
  • Write and maintain production-grade Java code, participate in coding tasks regularly, and model best practices for the engineering team to ensure high code quality and consistency.
  • Define and enforce coding standards, design patterns (SOLID, DDD where appropriate), code review processes, and branch/merge policies to improve reliability and maintainability of the codebase.
  • Design, implement and optimize RESTful APIs and RPC interfaces, including versioning strategies, backward compatibility and API documentation for internal and external consumers.
  • Own the system architecture for scalability and performance: perform capacity planning, load testing, performance profiling, JVM tuning, and investigate memory/leak/perf anomalies.
  • Drive the adoption and implementation of cloud-native patterns on AWS, Azure or GCP — including infrastructure as code (Terraform/CloudFormation), autoscaling, and cost-conscious architecture decisions.
  • Implement containerization and orchestration standards using Docker and Kubernetes; design deployment, service mesh, and clustering strategies for high availability and resilience.
  • Design and integrate asynchronous messaging and event-driven solutions using Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent, including schema management, partitioning strategy, and consumer group design.
  • Lead CI/CD pipeline design and automation (Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI), introducing reliable build/test/deploy workflows, blue/green or canary deployments, and rollback processes.
  • Establish observability and monitoring: define logging, metrics, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger), alerting thresholds, and incident runbooks for critical Java services.
  • Ensure application security and compliance: implement authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT), secure coding practices, vulnerability scanning, secret management, and support audits.
  • Mentor and grow engineers: run regular 1:1s, provide technical coaching, give actionable code review feedback, and drive professional development and hiring activities.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with Product Managers, QA, UX, and Operations to plan releases, scope work, estimate effort, and manage project risks and dependencies.
  • Drive test strategy and quality assurance: champion unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing (JUnit, Mockito, Testcontainers), and push for automation to reduce regressions.
  • Manage and prioritize technical debt: own backlog items for refactors, platform improvements, and legacy migrations while communicating trade-offs to stakeholders.
  • Lead production incident response as on-call technical lead: investigate root cause, coordinate fixes and rollouts, prepare post-incident reports, and implement preventative measures.
  • Define and own service-level objectives (SLOs), service-level indicators (SLIs) and availability targets for critical Java services, and steer reliability engineering efforts to meet SLAs.
  • Drive data modeling and persistence strategy: design relational and NoSQL schemas (Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra), indexing, caching (Redis), and transactional patterns for consistency and throughput.
  • Evaluate, select and introduce new libraries, frameworks and tooling; run proof-of-concepts and provide recommendations that reduce risk and accelerate engineering velocity.
  • Oversee release management and versioning policies, coordinate production deployments, and maintain release notes, migration guides and rollback procedures.
  • Communicate technical roadmaps and architecture decisions clearly to senior leadership; prepare presentations and decision documents to secure buy-in and funding.
  • Participate in recruitment: define role requirements, evaluate candidates technically, and help onboard new hires into the Java engineering organization.
  • Promote a culture of continuous improvement, collaboration, and inclusive engineering practices: encourage knowledge sharing, documentation, and cross-team initiatives.

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.
  • Maintain and update architectural diagrams, runbooks, and technical documentation for services and integrations.
  • Assist in vendor evaluation and manage third-party integrations and licensing where necessary.
  • Support performance reviews, career pathing and competency assessments for team members.
  • Conduct periodic architecture and security reviews to ensure compliance with enterprise standards.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert in Java (Java 8+) with deep knowledge of JVM internals, garbage collection, and performance tuning.
  • Strong experience with Spring Framework: Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Data, Spring Security and Spring Cloud components.
  • Proven background designing and building microservices, including API design, service decomposition, inter-service communication and resilience patterns.
  • Hands-on experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and ORMs (Hibernate/JPA); ability to write performant SQL and schema migrations.
  • Experience with NoSQL stores (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB) and when to apply them versus relational models.
  • Experience with message brokers and event streaming platforms (Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ) and building event-driven architectures.
  • Containerization and orchestration skills: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS), Helm charts and deployment strategies.
  • Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure or GCP): compute, networking, storage, IAM, and cost optimization.
  • CI/CD and build automation: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Maven/Gradle, artifact repositories (Nexus, Artifactory).
  • Strong automated testing skills: unit testing (JUnit), mocking (Mockito), contract testing, and integration test automation (Testcontainers).
  • Familiarity with observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stacks, OpenTelemetry/Jaeger and APM tools (New Relic, Datadog).
  • Security best practices for web applications: OAuth2/OpenID Connect, JWT, encryption, secret management (Vault).
  • Source control expertise: Git workflows, branching models, pull request reviews and large-scale repo management.
  • Knowledge of design patterns, architectural patterns (CQRS, Event Sourcing), and software engineering principles (SOLID).
  • Experience with performance profiling tools (VisualVM, YourKit) and load testing tools (JMeter, Gatling).
  • Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code: Terraform or CloudFormation.
  • Experience with distributed systems, consistency models and transactional guarantees.

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership and people management: mentor, coach and elevate engineers while fostering ownership and accountability.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication: translate complex technical topics into business-focused language for stakeholders.
  • Strategic thinking and decision making: balance short-term delivery with long-term architecture and sustainability.
  • Problem solving and troubleshooting: investigative mindset, data-driven root cause analysis and practical remediation.
  • Stakeholder management and collaboration: work effectively with product, QA, security, and operations teams to drive delivery.
  • Time management and prioritization: manage multiple initiatives, set clear expectations and meet deadlines.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: stay current with Java ecosystem and cloud-native patterns and apply improvements.
  • Conflict resolution and negotiation skills during technical debates and resource constraints.
  • Coaching and hiring acumen: identify talent gaps, interview effectively, and build high-performing teams.
  • Attention to quality and customer focus: advocate for end-user reliability, security and performance.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology or related technical field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
  • Relevant professional certifications (Oracle Java, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Electrical / Computer Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 6–12+ years of professional software development experience with at least 3–5 years working in Java-based back-end systems.

Preferred:

  • 8+ years of Java development experience and 2+ years in a lead/technical lead role responsible for architecture and delivery.
  • Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional teams, delivering complex production systems, and operating services in cloud environments.
  • Prior experience in high-throughput and highly available systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, and observability at scale.
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