Senior Backend Architect — Java & Distributed Systems

watu; United States; Remote; USD 103,000 - 137,000; Full time

Job summary

Watu is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer (Java / Architecture) to own end-to-end backend domain design within a squad, shaping system evolution and ensuring reliability. You will operate with significant autonomy, champion architectural decisions, and push for high-quality, maintainable code across distributed services.

The role emphasizes Java/Spring Boot depth, API design, and the ability to reason about distributed systems, failure modes, and downstream consumers of code.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience with design decisions

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs used by squads, partners, and products.
• Write unit and integration tests as part of development.
• Drive architecture discussions within your squad and defend technical choices.
• Review pull requests for design, maintainability, performance, and test coverage.
• Write and maintain API specs, service READMEs, and runbooks for owned systems.
• Contribute to shared libraries and platform standards.
• Use AI/LLM tooling for code generation, testing, and documentation.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

REST API design

Relational databases

Distributed systems

Testing (JUnit/Mockito)

Tools

OpenAPI/Swagger

AWS

Job description

Watu is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer (Java / Architecture) to own end-to-end backend domain design within a squad, shaping system evolution and ensuring reliability. You will operate with significant autonomy, champion architectural decisions, and push for high-quality, maintainable code across distributed services.

The role emphasizes Java/Spring Boot depth, API design, and the ability to reason about distributed systems, failure modes, and downstream consumers of code.