Onsite_Principal Java Developer_Jersey City, NJ

Title: Principal Java Developer

Location: Jersey City, NJ (Onsite)

Work Arrangement: Onsite

Employment Type: Contract

Duration: 6 Months

Primary Skills: , Microservices, Java, Docker/Kubernetes

We are seeking a Principal Java Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership for the design, development, and modernization of large-scale enterprise applications. The role requires deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot, microservices and cloud-native engineering, along with the ability to define technical direction, solve complex engineering challenges, and mentor development teams.

Key Responsibilities

Provide technical leadership for enterprise applications built using Java, Spring Boot and microservices architecture.

Design scalable, resilient, secure, and high-performing distributed systems.

Remain hands-on with architecture, design and critical code development, including code reviews and complex troubleshooting.

Define engineering patterns, reusable frameworks, coding standards, and development best practices.

Drive application modernization, including decomposition of legacy/monolithic applications into modern services.

Design and integrate REST APIs, event-driven services and asynchronous processing using technologies such as Kafka.

Lead technical decisions around APIs, data models, caching, resiliency, observability, and integration patterns.

Work with Docker, Kubernetes and cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS to develop and deploy cloud-native applications.

Drive engineering excellence across CI/CD, automated testing, security, performance and observability.

Troubleshoot complex production and performance issues across application, database, integration, and infrastructure layers.

Partner with architects, product owners, business teams and engineering leads to translate business requirements into effective technical solutions.

Mentor senior engineers and developers and provide technical guidance across multiple development squads.

Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend pragmatic adoption based on business and engineering value.

Required Skills

12+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building enterprise Java applications.

Expert-level knowledge of Java/JDK, Spring Framework, Spring Boot and Spring ecosystem.

Strong experience with microservices and distributed systems architecture.