Java/Kotlin - Technical Lead

DRS IT Solutions; California; Presencial; USD 190.000 - 270.000; Jornada completa

Descripción de la vacante

DRS IT Solutions is seeking a hands-on Staff Backend Engineer/Technical Lead to own and operate a production backend service. You’ll design, develop, deploy, and operate across application, infra, security, and product teams.

Ideal candidates have strong Kotlin/Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, distributed systems, MongoDB, Kafka, AWS, and Kubernetes experience, plus testing and observability skills. This is a senior, hands-on IC role with end-to-end ownership.

Formación

• Experience designing and operating production-grade backends.
• Strong knowledge of Kotlin or Java/JVM and Spring Boot.
• Experience with distributed systems, data models, and concurrency.

Responsabilidades

• Design, develop, deploy, and operate a production backend service.
• Collaborate with application, infra, security, and product teams.
• Drive cross-functional work with minimal supervision and lead initiatives.
• Ensure scalability, reliability, and safe rollback strategies.

Conocimientos

Kotlin/Java/JVM

Spring Boot

REST APIs

Distributed systems

MongoDB/DocumentDB

Kafka/Schema Registry

AWS/Kubernetes/CI-CD

IAM/Vault/secrets

Testing (Testcontainers)

Observability & incident response

Technical leadership

Descripción del empleo

We’re looking for a hands-on Staff Backend Engineer/Technical Lead

This person must be capable of independently designing, developing, deploying, and operating a production backend service while working effectively across application, infrastructure, security, and product teams.

Key requirements:

• Strong production experience with Kotlin or Java/JVM and Spring Boot
• Experience designing and supporting REST APIs and distributed systems
• Strong knowledge of MongoDB or Amazon DocumentDB, including data modeling, indexing, migrations, concurrency, and atomic updates
• Experience with Kafka, Avro, Schema Registry, asynchronous processing, retries, and idempotency
• Hands-on deployment experience with AWS, EKS/Kubernetes, Helm, and CI/CD
• Working knowledge of AWS IAM/IRSA, secrets management/Vault, and service networking
• Strong testing practices, including unit and integration testing with tools such as Testcontainers
• Experience with production observability, troubleshooting, incident response, and safe rollback strategies
• Demonstrated technical leadership and ability to drive cross-functional work with minimal supervision

Nice-to-have experience:

• Temporal workflows
• Confluent Cloud
• Istio and OPA
• OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or Honeycomb
• Gradle, CircleCI, Jib, Cosign, and Snyk
• Legacy-system modernization or migration projects
• This is primarily a backend and platform-oriented role, not a frontend, pure DevOps, people-management, or machine-learning position. We need a senior individual contributor who remains hands-on and can take end-to-end ownership of the service.