Staff Backend Engineer: Hands-On Tech Lead for Scale

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

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.