Java Backend Engineer with SRE & Guidewire expereince

Apptoza Inc.; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Apptoza Inc. in Toronto, ON, is seeking a Java Backend Engineer with SRE experience and Guidewire exposure.

The role is hybrid, combining on-site collaboration with remote work options, and focuses on building automated tools to reduce toil, incident response, and reliability engineering practices. You will work with cross-functional teams to design resilient systems, implement monitoring and automation, and contribute to capacity planning and incident postmortems.

Qualifications

• Proven experience developing software in Java or a comparable OO language.
• Working knowledge of REST APIs, HTTP methods, JSON, and API design fundamentals.
• Familiarity with Spring Boot or another modern backend framework.
• Experience writing automated unit tests and debugging application failures.
• Familiarity with Git and pull-request-based development.
• Ability to read technical documentation, investigate unfamiliar code, and explain findings clearly.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Willingness to work collaboratively with developers, testers, analysts, and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Automate toil and build tools to reduce repetitive manual tasks and improve efficiency.
• Lead incident response and participate in on-call rotations to ensure service reliability.
• Define SLOs/SLAs and manage error budgets to balance speed and stability.
• Set up monitoring and observability pipelines using Prometheus, Grafana, and alerting.
• Conduct post-incident reviews and root cause analyses to prevent recurrence.
• Perform capacity planning based on traffic trends and forecast infrastructure needs.
• Collaborate with software engineers to design resilient architectures and improve reliability by design.

Skills

Java

REST APIs

Spring Boot

Unit testing

Git & PRs

Documentation reading

Communication

Collaboration

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

PagerDuty

OpenAPI/Swagger

JUnit

Mockito

Postman

Kubernetes

AWS

GitHub Actions

Vault

Job description

Role: Java Backend Engineer with SRE & Guidewire expereince

Location: Toronto, ON – Hybrid

Job Description:

Automation and Reducing Toil: SREs write code and build tools to automate repetitive manual tasks (known as \"toil\"), aiming to spend roughly 50% of their time on software and engineering projects.

Incident Response and Management: They act as first-line responders for critical emergencies, handle on-call rotations, troubleshoot failures, and restore service.

SLOs, SLAs, and Error Budgets: They define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), managing \"error budgets\" to balance release speed with system stability.

Monitoring and Observability: They set up logging, metrics, and alerting systems (using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or PagerDuty) to detect problems before they impact users.

Post-Incident Reviews: They conduct root cause analysis (postmortems) to ensure failures do not repeat.

Capacity Planning: They analyze traffic and usage patterns to forecast future infrastructure and hardware needs.

Cross-Team Collaboration: They work alongside software developers to design resilient architectures and make applications more reliable by design.

Required Skills:

Primary qualifications

• Demonstrated experience developing software in Java or a comparable object-oriented language.
• Working knowledge of REST APIs, HTTP methods, JSON, and common API design principles.
• Familiarity with Spring Boot or another modern backend framework.
• Experience writing automated unit tests and debugging application failures.
• Familiarity with Git and pull-request-based development.
• Ability to read technical documentation, investigate unfamiliar code, and explain findings clearly.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Willingness to work collaboratively with developers, testers, analysts, and stakeholders.

Additional preferred qualifications

• Guidewire and commercial insurance: Guidewire PolicyCenter, Gosu, Guidewire Cloud APIs, commercial property and casualty insurance, underwriting, policy administration, or workflow automation.
• API design, integration, and security: OpenAPI/Swagger, JSON Schema, Apigee or another API gateway, API Developer Portal, OAuth 2.0, JWT, mTLS, or certificate-based security.
• Event and data integration: Kafka, Schema Registry, event-driven architecture, asynchronous processing, PostgreSQL, Liquibase, or database migration tooling.
• Cloud delivery and engineering platforms: GitHub Actions, Harness, AWS, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, infrastructure as code, or comparable CI/CD and cloud technologies.
• Automated testing and partner integration: Postman, JUnit, Mockito, Playwright, or experience integrating multiple systems and external partners.