Senior Technical Lead

Responsibilities:

• Build hands-on, everyday architecture and develop high-performance backend services (Java/Spring Boot, Golang): REST APIs, gRPC, and event-driven interfaces. This is a coding role, not a supervisory one.
• Lead technical design for Point Card backend features, produce design docs and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) in consultation with, and aligned to the direction of, the Solution Architecture (SA) team. You do the design work for your platform; SA owns the org-wide architecture direction you align to.
• Own the full SDLC for critical components: design, implement, test, deploy, and monitor.
• Design and optimize MySQL/MariaDB schemas, Redis caching strategies, and Kafka event-driven workflows for high-throughput transactional systems.
• Contribute to modernization and EOL work: decommission legacy systems, remove single points of failure, and support data/platform migrations while keeping the platform live and correct.
• Design for graceful degradation when caching, messaging, or database dependencies fail; support DR/failover and business-continuity readiness.
• Lead production incident response triage, root cause analysis, JVM profiling, Golang runtime diagnostics, and distributed-trace correlation.
• Define SLIs/SLOs and instrument services with Prometheus metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing.
• Lead technical design reviews and mentor junior, mid-level, and senior engineers through code reviews, design walkthroughs, and pairing.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes deployments, and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary).
• Champion AI-ization: embed AI coding/review agents into the team's workflow and quantify the efficiency gains.

Requirements:

• 8-11 years of backend engineering experience with systems in production at scale, and a clear track record of remaining hands-on in code.
• Deep Java and Spring Boot/Cloud/Security expertise, including JVM tuning and production troubleshooting.
• Golang proficiency for building high-performance backend services and tooling; ability to diagnose goroutine leaks, memory bloat, and scheduler latency using pprof.
• Experience leading technical design, producing design docs and ADRs, and collaborating with architecture/SA functions to align designs to a broader direction.
• Strong RESTful API design: versioning, idempotency, error handling, and OpenAPI documentation.
• MySQL/MariaDB schema design, query optimization, and index strategy.
• Redis caching, session management, distributed locking, and rate limiting.
• Apache Kafka event-driven design, topic partitioning, consumer group management, and exactly-once semantics, including real-world authentication (SASL/Kerberos) and STG/PROD config-parity discipline.
• Distributed systems fundamentals: CAP theorem, idempotency, saga pattern, eventual consistency.
• Docker and Kubernetes production deployment, resource management, and pod lifecycle.
• CI/CD: GitLab CI or Jenkins, blue/green and canary deployments.
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry/Jaeger).
• Security: OAuth 2.0 OpenID Connect, JWT, OWASP Top 10 secrets management.
• Cloud hands-on with GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and leading technical design discussions.

Desired Qualifications:

• Practical experience integrating LLM APIs (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini) into production systems and adopting AI coding/review tools within an engineering workflow.
• FinTech/payments domain knowledge: transaction processing, idempotency, financial-data compliance.
• Experience modernizing or migrating legacy systems, EOL decommissioning, data migration, and breaking apart single points of failure with minimal customer impact.
• Multi-region resilience and disaster-recovery experience.
• Experience with high-throughput point/loyalty or settlement systems.
• Cross-cultural, globally distributed team experience; exposure to a Japanese business context a plus.
• Knowledge of Agile/Scrum as a technical lead within a Scrum team.
• Tech Stack: Java 17+, Spring Boot/Cloud, Golang, MySQL/MariaDB, Redis, Apache Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, GCP, GitLab CI, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry, OAuth 2.0/OIDC, and Git.