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. Must Have skills 8+ years of experience building production backend systems in Java, including modern Java 17/21. 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. #LI-KS1 #D480
