Lead Backend Engineer: Java, AWS & Kafka

Next Frontier Capital; New York (NY); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

JPMorganChase in New York is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to drive backend platform design and delivery on an agile team. You’ll shape architectures, write production code, and guide cross‑functional collaboration.

Responsibilities include building distributed services with Java/Kafka/AWS, ensuring scalability, reliability, and observability, plus mentoring engineers and promoting modern engineering practices.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of applied software engineering experience.
• Expert proficiency in Java (Java 17+), including concurrency and performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience building and operating distributed systems with Apache Kafka (partitions/consumer groups, exactly-once semantics, schema management).
• Strong AWS experience and infrastructure-as-code (ECS/EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS, S3, KMS, IAM, CloudWatch; Terraform or CloudFormation).
• Strong grasp of event-driven and microservices architecture, REST APIs, and asynchronous messaging patterns.
• Proven experience implementing CI/CD, automated testing, and safe deployment strategies (blue/green or canary).
• Solid reliability and observability fundamentals (retries/idempotency/timeouts; logs/metrics/tracing).
• Experience leading projects/teams, setting technical direction, and delivering complex production systems.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum (or similar).

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of distributed, event-driven back-end services (Java, Kafka, AWS), from concept through production support
• Set architecture direction and standards for scalability, reliability, and observability across services
• Partner with product, architecture, and platform teams to turn requirements into resilient designs and executable roadmaps
• Raise engineering quality through strong CI/CD, automated testing, code reviews, and operational readiness (SLIs/SLOs, on-call)
• Own production operations for critical services (monitoring, incident response, root‑cause analysis, and continuous improvement)
• Drive data modeling and API design for high‑throughput, low‑latency systems, including backward compatibility and schema evolution
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pair programming, coaching, and technical guidance

Skills

Java (Java 17+)

Kafka

AWS

CI/CD

REST APIs

Distributed systems

Agile/Scrum

System design

Java performance tuning

Tools

Terraform

ECS/EKS

CloudWatch

Job description

JPMorganChase in New York is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to drive backend platform design and delivery on an agile team. You’ll shape architectures, write production code, and guide cross‑functional collaboration.

Responsibilities include building distributed services with Java/Kafka/AWS, ensuring scalability, reliability, and observability, plus mentoring engineers and promoting modern engineering practices.