Senior Engineering Lead ( Java /Microservices / GCP)/Sr Associate director
Skills
About the role
Job Description - Senior Associate Director, Engineering (GCB4)
Profile focus: Strong technology leader with proven system design capability and hands-on Java engineering experience.
Role purpose
Lead the end-to-end design and delivery of resilient, cloud-native data platforms and microservices. You’ll set technical direction, modernize legacy estates, and stay close enough to the code to unblock teams and raise engineering quality - especially in Java/Spring Boot and distributed system design.
Key responsibilities
Technical leadership & architecture
Own solution architecture for high-performance data pipelines and microservices, covering non-functional requirements (resilience, scalability, latency, observability, security).
Define and drive modernization roadmaps (re-platform, refactor, microservices decomposition), ensuring minimal disruption to live services.
Establish engineering standards for API design, event-driven integration, data modelling, testing strategy, CI/CD and operational readiness.
manage technical debt with clear prioritization and measurable outcomes.
Hands-on delivery (Java-centric)
Architect, Design and build core services using Java (8+), Spring Boot 3, JPA, PostgreSQL (or any RDBMS ), and event streaming patterns.
Lead real-time processing implementations using Apache Flink (and/or Apache Beam) where appropriate.
Partners with engineers in code reviews, pair debugging, performance tuning, and production incident resolution.
Build automation for engineering efficiency (scripting, tooling, testing), leveraging Python where needed.
Cloud, data & platform engineering (GCP)
Drive engineering delivery on GCP: Dataflow, Pub/Sub, GCS, Composer/Airflow, BigQuery (and/or ClickHouse), and GKE.
Own operational excellence for production workloads: monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, reliability improvements and cost optimization.
Ensure data quality, integrity, lineage and security controls across pipelines and downstream consumption.
People leadership & stakeholder management
Coach and mentor engineers across levels; build a culture of craftsmanship, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Communicate effectively with senior stakeholders - translating business outcomes into technical plans and delivery milestones.
Proactively manage risks, dependencies and delivery impediments with clear mitigation and escalation paths.
Required skills & experience
15+ years in software engineering, including significant experience designing and delivering distributed systems and data-intensive applications.
Strong hands-on Java experience (recent and demonstrable) with Spring Boot, REST/event-driven services, ORM (JPA/Hibernate), and SQL performance tuning.
Proven system design skills: microservices patterns, async messaging, idempotency, consistency models, caching, rate limiting, and failure handling.
Solid experience delivering cloud-native solutions, preferably GCP (or equivalent cloud with ability to translate).
Strong troubleshooting ability across applications, data, infrastructure and performance layers.
Clear communicator; able to align architecture decisions with business priorities and operational constraints.
Desirable / nice to have
Kubernetes and deployment tooling: GKE, Helm, CI/CD pipelines.
Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Stackdriver/Cloud Monitoring, distributed tracing.
Security practices in cloud/Kubernetes: secrets management, IAM, network segmentation, secure SDLC.
Front-end exposure (helpful, not essential): React, TypeScript.
MongoDB and polyglot persistence experience.
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