Technical Lead - Java

Requirements:

• Experience: 12 to 15 years of professional Java development, with at least 4 years in financial services or fintech and at least 2 years in a tech lead or senior architect capacity.
• Leadership: Proven ability to lead, grow, and hold accountable for a team of developers in an agile, sprint-based environment.
• Communication: Articulates architecture trade-offs clearly to both engineering peers and C-level / client stakeholders; comfortable presenting in design forums.
• Ownership: Strong sense of accountability and end-to-end ownership of features, production stability, and engineering quality.
• Problem Solving: Independently investigates and resolves complex production issues; strong RCA discipline.
• Collaboration: Works effectively in globally distributed, agile/SAFe teams; manages cross-squad dependencies with maturity.

Core Technical Skills:

• Java (17/21+): Expert-level Core Java generics, collections, streams, functional programming, memory model, JVM tuning, and GC analysis.
• Spring Ecosystem: Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Batch, Spring Data JPA, Spring Security. Production-grade, multi-team delivery experience required.
• Multithreading and Concurrency: ExecutorService, CompletableFuture, virtual threads (Project Loom), reactive programming (Reactor/RxJava), and designing deadlock-free reconciliation engines.
• SQL and RDBMS: Advanced SQL, window functions, CTEs, partitioning, bulk operations, and stored procedures in DB2 or MS SQL Server. Query plan mastery.
• Microservices and APIs: RESTful and event-driven API design; API gateway patterns; IBM MQ, Kafka (advanced schema registry, DLQs, and exactly-once semantics).
• Cloud and Kubernetes: Hands-on AWS/Azure/GCP EKS/AKS, Helm, Terraform/CloudFormation, Secrets Manager, IAM, and Kubernetes RBAC and network policies.
• Rule Engines: Drools (DRL, decision tables, KieSession hot-reload), Easy Rules, or OpenL Tablets in production financial matching/exception triage contexts.
• Architecture Patterns: CQRS, Event Sourcing, Saga, Outbox, Strangler Fig, and Bulkhead are applied in real production financial systems.

New/Elevated Skills (12-15 yr Level):

• Technical Leadership: Demonstrated experience leading teams of 4-8 engineers; conducting architecture reviews, mentoring, and raising engineering standards.
• Observability and SRE: Defining SLOs/SLIs, Prometheus/Grafana/Datadog dashboards, structured logging (ELK/Splunk), and distributed tracing (Jaeger/Zipkin).
• Security and Compliance: OWASP, PCI-DSS, secrets management (Vault), audit log design for MiFID II / Basel III compliance contexts.
• Vendor and Stakeholder Management: Experience as the primary technical interface with client architects, RFP evaluation, and C-level technical presentations.
• Event-Driven Architecture: Kafka schema registries, DLQ strategies, exactly-once semantics, and event versioning governance across multi-team environments.
• CI/CD and DevOps Maturity: Blue-green deployments, feature flags, IaC ownership, and release governance in regulated financial environments.

Financial Domain Knowledge (Preferred):

• Transaction lifecycle: Deep understanding of trade capture, settlement, confirmation, and clearing in banking and capital markets.
• Reconciliation concepts: NOSTRO/VOSTRO, cash breaks, position breaks, aging analysis, and exception resolution workflows.
• Messaging standards: SWIFT MT/MX, ISO 20022, FIX protocol. Exposure to IntelliMatch or similar reconciliation platforms is a strong plus.

Tools and Environment:

• Build and DevOps: Maven/Gradle, Git, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Docker/Podman, Kubernetes, Helm, and Terraform.
• Testing: JUnit 5, Mockito, Testcontainers, Gatling/JMeter for performance, mutation testing (PIT).
• Monitoring: Splunk, Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, Jaeger with alerting, runbooks, and on-call governance experience.
• OS: Linux/Unix proficiency, shell scripting, Cron, log analysis, performance diagnostics.