Senior Java Cloud Lead Developer

Senior Java Cloud Lead Developer

Location : Washington, DC

Long term

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

(Other duties may be assigned)

• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade backend services and APIs supporting train consist management, yard management, equipment management, scheduling, and operational workflows.

• Lead backend development efforts using Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, and event-driven architectures.

• Design, develop, and support Kafka-based event-driven integrations, producers, consumers, and messaging workflows.

• Design and implement scalable integrations with internal and external systems using APIs, messaging, batch processes, and data pipelines.

• Perform code reviews, mentor developers, and promote engineering best practices across the team.

• Develop and maintain high-quality, secure, and performant Java applications following enterprise standards.

• Design and optimize PostgreSQL database models, queries, indexing strategies, and data access patterns.

• Develop and support batch processing, scheduling, data synchronization, and reconciliation processes.

• Collaborate with Product Owners, Architects, UX designers, and business stakeholders to refine requirements and deliver scalable solutions.

• Participate in application deployment, release planning, production support, performance tuning, and troubleshooting activities.

• Contribute to cloud-native application development and CI/CD automation in AWS environments.

• Ensure adherence to security, compliance, observability, and operational excellence standards.

Minimum Qualifications:

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

• 8+ years of hands-on experience developing enterprise applications using Java.

• 5+ years of experience with Spring Boot, REST APIs, and microservice-based architectures.

• 3+ years of hands-on experience developing solutions with Apache Kafka.

• Experience designing event-driven architectures using Kafka and messaging platforms.

• Experience building, deploying, and troubleshooting Kafka producers and consumers.

• Understanding of Kafka topics, partitions, consumer groups, offsets, retries, and message delivery patterns.

• Strong experience designing and implementing integration solutions between enterprise systems.

• Strong experience with PostgreSQL database design, SQL optimization, indexing, data modeling, and query tuning.

• Experience building and consuming RESTful APIs and integrating with external systems.

• Hands-on experience with AWS services such as:

o ECS/Fargate

o API Gateway

o Lambda

o S3

o CloudWatch

o Secrets Manager

o ECR CloudFormation

o CodePipeline

o CodeBuild

• Experience with Angular and modern web application architectures.

• Experience developing batch processing and scheduler-based applications.

• Strong understanding of event-driven design, domain-driven design, and distributed system patterns.

• Experience with CI/CD and DevOps practices using tools such as Git, Jenkins, Bitbucket, Jira, SonarQube, and automated deployment pipelines.

• Experience working in Agile/Scrum development environments.

• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, communication, and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with transportation, logistics, railroad, scheduling, asset management, or operational systems.

• Experience with OAuth2/OIDC, Azure Entra ID (Azure AD), SSO, and application security best practices.

• Experience supporting production applications in AWS cloud environments.

• Experience with Dynatrace, CloudWatch, Splunk, or similar monitoring and observability platforms.

• Experience designing highly available and scalable enterprise solutions.

• Kafka administration experience, including topic management, monitoring, performance tuning, and troubleshooting.

• Experience with Schema Registry, message serialization (Avro/JSON), and Kafka ecosystem tooling.

• Experience with large-scale data ingestion, reconciliation, and operational reporting systems.