Role:Lead Software Engineer (Java/AWS)
Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid – 3 days onsite per week)
Duration: 12 Months (Start Date: July 6, 2026)
Interview Process: 2 Rounds (Technical Screening + 2-Hour Technical Panel; onsite interview preferred for local candidates)
Employment Type: Contract (C2C) Important Notes
Local Candidates Only: Must currently reside in the Chicago area
Leadership Requirement: Minimum 2 years of hands-on technical lead experience
Education: Bachelor's Degree required
Required Technical Skills (10+ Years Each)
- Advanced Java and/or Kotlin development in enterprise production environments
- AWS cloud architecture and cloud-native application development
- Spring Boot for Microservices and REST API development
- Microservices architecture and distributed systems design
- RESTful API design, development, and documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger)
- SQL and relational database design, optimization, and performance tuning
- NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB, MongoDB, or Cassandra
Additional Required Experience
- CI/CD pipelines, build automation, and release management
- Event-driven architecture and asynchronous messaging platforms (Kafka preferred)
- Observability tools including logging, monitoring, metrics, tracing, and production support
- Infrastructure-as-Code, resiliency, fault tolerance, and high-availability systems
- Performance tuning, incident management, and root cause analysis
Key Responsibilities
- Provide technical leadership in the design and implementation of cloud-native applications on AWS.
- Architect scalable, secure, and highly available distributed systems using Java/Kotlin and AWS services.
- Drive architectural decisions across microservices, event-driven systems, and asynchronous processing patterns.
- Design and develop RESTful APIs and event-based integrations.
- Define service boundaries, integration patterns, resiliency strategies, and technical standards.
- Lead the development of core backend services and distributed data management solutions.
- Guide adoption of AWS-native services for compute, storage, messaging, and databases.
- Identify and resolve architectural bottlenecks, performance issues, technical debt, and production incidents.
- Establish best practices for CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
- Conduct code reviews, mentor engineers, and lead technical design discussions.
- Collaborate with Product Owners, Engineering Managers, and cross-functional teams to deliver business-critical solutions.
- Participate in architecture reviews, sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, and retrospectives.
Required Soft Skills
- Strong technical communication and stakeholder management skills
- Proven ability to lead technical initiatives and influence architectural decisions
- Excellent analytical, troubleshooting, and problem-solving abilities
- Strong collaboration skills across engineering and business teams
- Ability to balance technical excellence with delivery commitments in an Agile environment