Senior Backend Software Engineer (supporting NOAA)

Colonial Group; Silver Spring (MD); Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

ASRC Federal is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer with strong ETL and relational database performance experience for a remote, full-time role. You will design, develop, and optimize data pipelines and the database backend supporting our applications.

The role emphasizes building robust, scalable systems, SQL/ORM performance, and API integration using Java, Spring, JPA/Hibernate, and OpenSearch. Collaboration with engineers and stakeholders is essential to define requirements and improve

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field or equivalent experience.
• Strong Java development experience in production backend applications.
• Proven ability to design, develop, and optimize ETL pipelines and data integration workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain Java-based ETL workflows that extract, transform, validate, and load data from databases, APIs, files, and other sources.
• Implement data cleansing, transformation, deduplication, and reconciliation for accurate downstream data.
• Develop incremental loading, batching, retry, and recovery processes ensuring reliable execution without duplicates.
• Build ORM-based data access layers using Java persistence frameworks such as JPA/Hibernate.
• Develop and optimize SQL queries and inspect JPQL/SQL generated by ORM for performance bottlenecks.
• Improve database performance via indexing, query restructuring, and efficient loading strategies.
• Design relational schemas, constraints, and versioned migrations.
• Implement and optimize OpenSearch/Elasticsearch queries and keep search indexes in sync with source data.
• Monitor pipeline reliability and data quality, troubleshoot production issues, and demonstrate measurable improvements.
• Create automated tests for transformation logic and database interactions.

Skills

Java

ETL pipelines

SQL tuning

JPA/Hibernate

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

GraphQL

Education

BS/BA in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Spring Framework

AWS (RDS)

Job description

ASRC Federal is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer with strong experience in ETL development and relational database performance for a remote, full-time position

This role will design, develop, and optimize data pipelines and the database backend supporting our applications. Primary responsibilities include implementing data ingestion and transformation workflows, developing ORM-based data access using Java persistence frameworks, and optimizing SQL and database operations.

The ideal candidate is passionate about building robust, scalable systems. They bring strong software engineering fundamentals and can troubleshoot performance across Java application code, ORM-generated queries, and relational databases. Backend services and API development will support data integration, processing, and retrieval.

Primary Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain Java-based ETL workflows that extract, transform, validate, and load data from databases, APIs, files, and other source systems.
• Implement data cleansing, transformation, deduplication, and reconciliation to ensure accurate and consistent downstream data.
• Develop incremental loading, batching, retry, and recovery processes that support reliable execution and safe reprocessing without duplicate records
• Build and maintain ORM-based data access layers using Java persistence frameworks such as JPA/Hibernate, including entity mappings, relationships, and transaction management.
• Develop and optimize SQL queries supporting application functionality and data processing.
• Inspect SQL generated by JPA/Hibernate in Spring applications and analyze database execution plans to identify inefficient joins, excessive database calls, unnecessary data retrieval, and other performance bottlenecks.
• Improve database performance through appropriate indexing, query restructuring, batching, pagination, and relationship-loading strategies.
• Design and maintain relational schemas, constraints, indexes, and versioned database migrations.
• Select ORM operations, parameterized SQL, or database-native bulk operations according to workload, maintainability, and performance requirements.
• Implement and optimize OpenSearch or Elasticsearch queries, filters, and aggregations; troubleshoot search performance and maintain consistency between source data and search indexes.
• Monitor pipeline reliability, data quality, processing throughput, and query response times; troubleshoot production issues and demonstrate measurable improvements.
• Create automated tests for transformation logic, database interactions, data integrity, and recovery behavior
• Collaborate with engineers and stakeholders to define requirements, document data mappings, and review database and pipeline designs.

• Design, develop, and maintain GraphQL APIs and resolvers to support efficient data retrieval and integration with backend services and relational databases.

• Develop and optimize database integrations using Amazon Aurora within Amazon RDS in AWS, including connection management, schema migrations, ETL workflows, and query performance tuning.

Required Technical Qualifications

• Strong Java development experience building and supporting production backend applications.
• Demonstrated experience designing, developing, and maintaining ETL pipelines and data integration workflows.
• Hands-on experience with Java Spring ORM and persistence frameworks such as JPA/Hibernate.
• Experience writing and optimizing JPQL and SQL queries, including troubleshooting ORM-generated SQL.
• Strong SQL proficiency, including complex joins, common table expressions, window functions, aggregations, and set-based processing.
• Experience analyzing database execution plans and improving query performance through indexing and query changes.
• Experience with relational data modeling, schema migrations, entity relationships, and transaction management.
• Understanding of database isolation levels, locking, and concurrency.
• Experience implementing data validation, incremental processing, error handling, and recoverable data workflows.
• Experience with version control, code review, automated testing, and software deployment practices.
• Ability to explain production performance improvements using measured results.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with workflow orchestration, job scheduling, change data capture, and pipeline monitoring.
• Experience diagnosing ORM performance issues such as N+1 queries, inefficient relationship loading, and excessive entity loading.
• Experience processing large datasets within defined delivery windows while managing database resource utilization.
• Familiarity with Apache Spark for ETL and distributed data processing.

Education:

BS/BA degree (or equivalent) plus 8-10 years experience in related field.