Senior Java / Spring / Kafka Engineer (547)

About the role

Our client is seeking a Senior Java / Spring / Kafka Engineer to build, migrate, and optimize production-grade backend services using Java, Spring Boot, Apache Kafka, and AWS, including end-to-end ownership of cloud migrations and Kafka infrastructure.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience building production backend systems in Java, including modern Java 17/21.5+
• 5+ years of Spring Boot experience, including Spring Boot 2.x/3.x, Spring Data, Spring Security, and Spring Framework 6 migration
• 5+ years of hands-on Apache Kafka experience as both producer and consumer, including topic design, partitioning, consumer groups, exactly-once semantics, schema evolution, rebalances, ISR, and broker tuning
• Production experience with Spring for Apache Kafka and/or Spring Cloud Stream, including Kafka listeners, custom error handling, retry configuration, and transactional producers
• 3+ years of substantive AWS delivery experience supporting production workloads, with strong knowledge of EKS or ECS/Fargate, MSK/Confluent Cloud on AWS, VPC, IAM, RDS/Aurora, S3, CloudWatch, KMS, Route 53, ALB/NLB, CloudFront, API Gateway, and Secrets Manager/Parameter Store
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or AWS CDK, plus AWS CLI, boto3, and Java SDK v2
• At least one prior on-premises-to-AWS migration involving multiple services owned end-to-end, including the Kafka layer
• Experience with Confluent Schema Registry, Avro, or Protobuf and schema compatibility/promotion within CI pipelines
• Strong performance and latency troubleshooting skills using thread dumps, heap analysis, async-profiler, and JFR

Nice to Have skills

• Experience with GraalVM AOT/native builds where appropriate
• Experience embedding briefly into multiple application teams during migrations
• Strong written technical communication skills, including ADRs, runbooks, and migration playbooks
• Pragmatic decision-making around when to refactor versus rehost applications

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and support production-grade Java/Spring backend services
• Develop and operate Kafka-based producer and consumer solutions, including topic design, partitioning, consumer groups, transactional processing, and schema evolution
• Lead or contribute to end-to-end migrations of on-premises services and Kafka workloads to AWS
• Build and maintain AWS infrastructure using Terraform or AWS CDK
• Implement and support Spring Boot, Spring for Apache Kafka, and/or Spring Cloud Stream solutions
• Support Spring Boot 3/Spring Framework 6 migrations, including Jakarta EE namespace changes
• Implement schema-management processes using Confluent Schema Registry with Avro or Protobuf
• Diagnose application performance and latency issues using JVM profiling and diagnostic tools
• Produce clear technical documentation, including ADRs, runbooks, and migration playbooks
• Collaborate directly with multiple application teams to support cloud and application migrations