Senior Lead Engineer — Java, AWS & Kafka Backend

JPMorgan Chase & Co.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, NY, is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to join Consumer & Community Banking. You will lead the design and delivery of distributed back-end services, drive architecture direction, and ensure high quality through CI/CD and observability practices.

The role involves mentoring engineers and shaping scalable, secure systems. The position requires strong Java (17+), Kafka, AWS, and experience with modern architectures and Agile/Scrum processes.

Qualifications

• Formal training or certification on software engineering concepts and 5+ years applied experience.
• Expert proficiency in Java (Java 17+), including concurrency, collections, and performance tuning/profiling.
• Hands-on experience building and operating distributed systems with Apache Kafka (e.g., partitions/consumer groups, exactly-once semantics, schema management).
• Strong AWS experience and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., 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 (e.g., blue/green or canary).
• Solid reliability and observability fundamentals (e.g., 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

Kafka

AWS

CI/CD

REST APIs

Agile/Scrum

Distributed systems

Tools

Spring Boot

Spring Cloud

Micrometer

Project Reactor

Splunk

Dynatrace

Grafana

Terraform

CloudFormation

Job description

JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, NY, is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to join Consumer & Community Banking. You will lead the design and delivery of distributed back-end services, drive architecture direction, and ensure high quality through CI/CD and observability practices.

The role involves mentoring engineers and shaping scalable, secure systems. The position requires strong Java (17+), Kafka, AWS, and experience with modern architectures and Agile/Scrum processes.