Lead Engineer - Java

Responsibilities:
Lead, mentor, and manage a team of 8-10 engineers, fostering technical excellence and continuous growth.
Drive architectural discussions and provide technical leadership for backend and distributed systems development.
Plan, prioritise, and execute engineering deliverables while collaborating with global cross-functional teams.
Own technical decision-making, code quality, scalability, security, and system reliability.
Design and develop high-performance, scalable, and secure microservices-based applications.
Establish engineering best practices around API design, cloud-native development, testing, and deployment.
Collaborate closely with product managers, architects, QA engineers, and DevOps teams in an Agile environment.
Champion modern software engineering practices, including CI/CD, observability, automation, and cloud adoption.
Create an inclusive, high-performing engineering culture that attracts and retains top talent.
Stay updated with emerging technologies and drive innovation across backend platforms.
Requirements:
8-12 years of software engineering experience with strong expertise in backend development.
Strong hands-on experience in Java, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and microservices architecture.
Proven experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems and enterprise applications.
Strong experience in designing, developing, and securing RESTful APIs.
Experience with API design standards, OpenAPI/Swagger specifications, API documentation, and API lifecycle management.
Hands-on experience with API Gateway integration and API management platforms.
Good understanding of OAuth2 OpenID Connect (OIDC), JWT authentication, authorisation, and API security best practices.
Experience building cloud-native applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and DevOps practices.
Experience with event-driven architectures using Kafka.
Exposure to Elasticsearch for search and analytics use cases.
Experience with Scala is preferred.
Strong understanding of OOP, design patterns, data structures, algorithms, and system design.
Experience integrating applications with databases such as Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, or similar.
Strong knowledge of version control systems (Git) and project tracking tools (JIRA).
Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments with Test-Driven Development (TDD) and quality engineering practices.
Leadership Skills:
Proven experience leading and mentoring engineering teams.
Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Ability to drive technical roadmap, architectural decisions, and engineering best practices.
Excellent communication, problem-solving, and decision-making abilities.
Preferred Skills:
Experience with service discovery and resilience patterns (Eureka, Hystrix/Resilience4j).
Exposure to containerisation and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
Experience with observability tools, monitoring, and logging frameworks.
Knowledge of AI-assisted development tools and modern engineering productivity practices.
Nice to Have:
Experience building platform engineering or API-first products.
Experience with multi-cloud environments.
Exposure to GenAI/LLM integrations and AI-powered backend services.

Experience
8-10 yrs