Staff Backend Engineer

DRS IT Solutions; California; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

DRS IT Solutions is seeking a hands-on Staff Backend Engineer/Technical Lead in California to own design, development, deployment, and operation of a production backend service.

You will collaborate with infrastructure, security, and product teams, lead technical efforts, ensure reliability, and mentor engineers while staying hands-on with Kotlin/Java, Spring Boot, and distributed systems.

Qualifications

• Hands-on design, development, deployment, and operation of production backends.
• Experience with REST APIs and distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of NoSQL DBs and data modeling.
• Leadership experience driving cross-functional work.

Responsibilities

• Independently design, develop, deploy, and operate a production backend service across application, infrastructure, security, and product teams.
• Drive cross-functional work with minimal supervision and take end-to-end ownership of the service.

Skills

Kotlin

Java/JVM

Spring Boot

REST APIs

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Code quality

Problem solving

Tools

Kafka

Avro

Schema Registry

AWS

EKS/Kubernetes

Helm

CI/CD

Vault

Testcontainers

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

Job description

We’re looking for a hands‑on Staff Backend Engineer/Technical Lead

This person must be capable of independently designing, developing, deploying, and operating a production backend service while working effectively across application, infrastructure, security, and product teams.

Key requirements:

• Strong production experience with Kotlin or Java/JVM and Spring Boot
• Experience designing and supporting REST APIs and distributed systems
• Strong knowledge of MongoDB or Amazon DocumentDB, including data modeling, indexing, migrations, concurrency, and atomic updates
• Experience with Kafka, Avro, Schema Registry, asynchronous processing, retries, and idempotency
• Hands‑on deployment experience with AWS, EKS/Kubernetes, Helm, and CI/CD
• Working knowledge of AWS IAM/IRSA, secrets management/Vault, and service networking
• Strong testing practices, including unit and integration testing with tools such as Testcontainers
• Experience with production observability, troubleshooting, incident response, and safe rollback strategies
• Demonstrated technical leadership and ability to drive cross‑functional work with minimal supervision

Nice‑to‑have experience:

• Temporal workflows
• Confluent Cloud
• Istio and OPA
• OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or Honeycomb
• Gradle, CircleCI, Jib, Cosign, and Snyk
• Legacy‑system modernization or migration projects
• This is primarily a backend and platform‑oriented role, not a frontend, pure DevOps, people‑management, or machine‑learning position. We need a senior individual contributor who remains hands‑on and can take end‑to‑end ownership of the service.