Staff Backend Engineer: End-to-End Java/Kotlin Lead

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

Job summary

DRS IT Solutions in California is seeking a hands-on Staff Backend Engineer/Technical Lead who can design, develop, deploy, and operate a production backend service while collaborating across application, infrastructure, security, and product teams.

You will own the end-to-end service, mentor engineers, and drive cross-functional work with minimal supervision, delivering scalable systems using Kotlin/Java, Spring Boot, and AWS.

Qualifications

• Hands-on production experience with Kotlin/Java/JVM and Spring Boot.
• Experience designing and supporting REST APIs and distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of MongoDB or Amazon DocumentDB, incl data modeling and indexing.
• Experience with Kafka, Avro, Schema Registry, async processing, retries, and idempotency.
• Deployment experience with AWS, EKS/Kubernetes, Helm, and CI/CD.
• Knowledge of AWS IAM/IRSA, secrets management/Vault, and service networking.
• Strong testing practices with Testcontainers.
• Production observability, troubleshooting, incident response, and safe rollback strategies.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and cross-functional ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, deploy, and operate a production backend service.
• Collaborate across application, infrastructure, security, and product teams.
• Own end-to-end service ownership and drive cross-functional work with minimal supervision.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Unit and integration testing

Tools

Kotlin

Java/JVM

Spring Boot

REST APIs

MongoDB/DocumentDB

Kafka

Avro

Schema Registry

AWS

EKS/Kubernetes

Helm

CI/CD

IAM/IRSA

Vault

Service networking

Testcontainers

Job description

DRS IT Solutions in California is seeking a hands-on Staff Backend Engineer/Technical Lead who can design, develop, deploy, and operate a production backend service while collaborating across application, infrastructure, security, and product teams.

You will own the end-to-end service, mentor engineers, and drive cross-functional work with minimal supervision, delivering scalable systems using Kotlin/Java, Spring Boot, and AWS.