IT Software Engineer 5 / Lead Java Backend Developer

Job Title

IT Software Engineer 5 / Lead Java Backend Developer

Location

Chicago, IL preferred but the role can be 100% remote but there will be travel involved when needed.

Duration: 12 months contract.

Position’s Contributions to Work Group

• Provides technical leadership and delivery ownership for a team of software engineers building and operating scalable cloud-native applications on AWS.
• Drives architecture decisions, engineering best practices, and solution design across Spring Boot microservices, OpenSearch platforms, CI/CD, observability and AWS infrastructure.
• Collaborates with product, architecture, and platform teams to deliver secure, resilient, and high-performing solutions while mentoring engineers, improving development processes, and ensuring successful execution of business objectives.

Typical task breakdown

• Leads software engineers in delivering business-critical applications.
• Establishes technical direction and architectural standards.
• Drives AWS cloud adoption and modernization initiatives.
• Ensures solution scalability, performance, security, and reliability.
• Promotes DevOps, CI/CD, automation, and AI-assisted development practices.
• Supports incident resolution, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.

Interaction with team

• Mentors’ engineers and develop technical talent.
• Partners with Product Owners, Architects, and stakeholders to align technology investments with business goals.

Education & Experience Required

• Bachelor’s degree is a must.
• 10+ years’ experience in this capacity with 5+ years in a lead role.

Required Technical Skills

Java (latest would be ideal), Spring Boot, Microservices, REST APIs, AWS (ECS/Fargate, IAM, ALB, RDS, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager), OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, Docker, CI/CD, GitHub, Distributed Systems, Cloud Architecture, Observability, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, SQL/NoSQL databases, Event-Driven Architecture, API Integration, Performance Optimization, and AI-assisted Development Tools.

Soft Skills

Strong technical leadership, communication, stakeholder management, mentoring and coaching, collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking, decision making, ownership, conflict resolution, adaptability, and the ability to influence cross-functional teams while driving successful delivery of complex cloud-native solutions.