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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for a Lead Java Software Engineer

💰 $140,000 - $195,000

Software EngineeringTechnologyJava DevelopmentLeadership

🎯 Role Definition

The Lead Java Software Engineer is a pivotal role that serves as the technical backbone for a software development team. This individual is more than just a senior coder; they are a mentor, an architect, and a strategic partner who guides the team in building robust, scalable, and high-quality software solutions. They are responsible for driving technical excellence, making critical architectural decisions, and ensuring the team adheres to best practices throughout the entire software development lifecycle. This role acts as a bridge, translating business requirements into tangible technical roadmaps and empowering the team to execute on that vision with confidence and clarity.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Java Software Engineer
  • Senior Backend Engineer
  • Team Lead (with a strong hands-on background)

Advancement To:

  • Principal Software Engineer
  • Software Engineering Manager
  • Solutions Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Lead
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Spearhead the design, architecture, and implementation of complex, scalable, and mission-critical microservices using the Java ecosystem.
  • Act as the hands-on technical leader for a squad of engineers, providing guidance, mentorship, and support through complex technical challenges.
  • Author and maintain clean, efficient, and well-documented code for core application features, setting the standard for the entire team.
  • Drive the technical roadmap for your domain, making key architectural decisions and advocating for technologies that align with long-term business goals.
  • Conduct rigorous and constructive code reviews to ensure high standards of quality, performance, and security are maintained across the codebase.
  • Champion and evolve our engineering best practices, including test-driven development (TDD), domain-driven design (DDD), and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD).
  • Own the end-to-end delivery of features, from initial conception and technical design through to deployment, monitoring, and ongoing maintenance in production.
  • Partner closely with Product Managers, UX Designers, and other stakeholders to refine requirements and ensure technical solutions are tightly aligned with user needs.
  • Proactively identify and resolve complex production issues, leading debugging efforts and implementing robust, long-term solutions to prevent recurrence.
  • Mentor and develop junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of learning, collaboration, and technical growth within the team.
  • Lead technical grooming and sprint planning sessions, breaking down large initiatives into manageable tasks and providing accurate effort estimations.
  • Evaluate, prototype, and recommend new tools, frameworks, and technologies to enhance developer productivity and improve system performance and reliability.
  • Define and govern API contracts and data models to ensure consistency and interoperability between services and with client applications.
  • Take ownership of the operational health of your team's services, including establishing effective monitoring, logging, and alerting strategies.
  • Design and implement comprehensive testing strategies, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, to ensure software is correct and resilient.
  • Actively manage and prioritize technical debt, creating a clear strategy for refactoring and modernization to maintain a healthy and evolving system.
  • Develop and maintain thorough technical documentation, including architectural diagrams, design documents, and runbooks for operational support.
  • Drive performance tuning and optimization efforts, using profiling tools and analysis to improve application latency, throughput, and resource consumption.
  • Ensure all solutions are designed and implemented with security as a primary concern, adhering to industry standards like OWASP and internal security policies.
  • Facilitate technical design sessions and architectural review meetings, clearly articulating complex concepts and driving consensus among senior engineers.

Secondary Functions

  • Actively participate in the engineering hiring process, conducting technical interviews and assessing candidates for both technical and cultural fit.
  • Present technical concepts, architectural decisions, and project outcomes to a broad audience, including non-technical stakeholders and executive leadership.
  • 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.
  • Engage in on-call rotation to ensure the stability and availability of our production systems.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert-Level Java Proficiency: Deep, hands-on expertise in modern Java (11/17+) and its core libraries, including a strong command of concurrency, data structures, and functional programming concepts.
  • Spring Framework Mastery: Extensive experience building applications with the Spring ecosystem, particularly Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, and Spring Data.
  • Cloud-Native Architecture: Proven ability to design, build, and deploy applications on major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), utilizing services like EC2, S3, RDS, and managed Kubernetes (EKS, GKE).
  • Microservices & API Design: In-depth knowledge of microservice patterns, RESTful API design principles, and experience with related technologies like gRPC and API Gateways.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Strong practical skills with Docker for containerizing applications and Kubernetes for orchestration, deployment, and scaling.
  • Database Technologies: Proficiency with both relational (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB) databases, including data modeling and performance tuning.
  • CI/CD & DevOps Tooling: Experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions to automate builds, testing, and deployments.
  • Asynchronous Messaging Systems: Solid understanding and practical application of message brokers and event streaming platforms like Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS SQS/SNS.
  • Observability & Monitoring: Competency in implementing and utilizing monitoring and logging tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or the ELK Stack to ensure system health.
  • Testing Frameworks & Methodologies: A firm belief in quality, with hands-on experience using testing frameworks like JUnit, Mockito, and Testcontainers, and practicing TDD/BDD.

Soft Skills

  • Technical Leadership & Mentorship: A natural ability to guide and inspire a team, share knowledge effectively, and elevate the skills of fellow engineers.
  • Exceptional Communication: The ability to clearly and concisely articulate complex technical ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences, both verbally and in writing.
  • Pragmatic Problem-Solving: A structured and analytical approach to troubleshooting complex issues, with a focus on finding simple, durable solutions.
  • Strategic & Architectural Thinking: The capacity to think beyond immediate tasks and consider the long-term impact of design decisions on the overall system architecture.
  • Sense of Ownership & Accountability: A strong commitment to taking responsibility for the team's outcomes, from code quality to production stability.
  • Collaborative Spirit: A genuine desire to work with others, fostering a positive and inclusive team environment where all ideas are valued.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's Degree or equivalent practical experience in a technical field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's Degree in a technical field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 8-12 years of professional experience in software development, with a significant focus on the Java ecosystem.

Preferred:

  • At least 2-3 years of demonstrated experience in a technical leadership capacity, formally or informally mentoring engineers and guiding the technical direction of significant projects.
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