Senior Backend Engineer: Architecture & Scale (Java/Spring)

Cognizant; Texas City (TX); On-site; USD 68,000 - 114,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance

Paid holidays + PTO

401(k) plan and contributions

Long-term/Short-term Disability

Paid Parental Leave

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Job summary

Cognizant is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer in the United States to shape scalable backend services for reporting, data access, and export workflows. You will own the technical roadmap, drive architectural decisions, and set engineering standards across teams.

You will translate ambiguous requirements into executable plans, review designs, and contribute hands-on code for high-risk work while mentoring engineers and collaborating with product, QA, and partner teams to ensure secure, reliable

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and operating production backend systems, with formal or informal leadership.
• Strong hands-on experience with Java and Spring or another modern backend language/framework and scalable distributed design.
• Proven ownership of architecture across multiple services, including REST API design, authentication/authorization, and security tradeoffs.
• Relational database expertise: schema design, migrations, performance, and data modeling.
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform, plus containerization and CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap for backend services supporting reporting, data access, scheduled processing, and export or delivery capabilities.
• Drive and document architectural decisions across interdependent services and data sources while balancing immediate delivery with long-term technical health.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for code quality, testing, API design, security, observability, and debt management.
• Translate ambiguous requirements into executable technical plans, review designs and code, and contribute hands-on code for high-risk work.
• Mentor engineers and collaborate with product, QA, and partner teams on scope, sequencing, dependencies, and architecture decisions.

Skills

Backend experience

Java/Spring

Architecture ownership

Relational databases

Cloud platforms (GCP)

Containers & CI/CD

Tools

REST API design

Job description

Cognizant is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer in the United States to shape scalable backend services for reporting, data access, and export workflows. You will own the technical roadmap, drive architectural decisions, and set engineering standards across teams.

You will translate ambiguous requirements into executable plans, review designs, and contribute hands-on code for high-risk work while mentoring engineers and collaborating with product, QA, and partner teams to ensure secure, reliable