Lead Java Engineer

Backend Lead Java position.

Experience: 12+ Years
Location: Onsite Dubai (Local UAE Candidates Only)
Notice Period: Immediate to 15 Days
Nationality: Indian

We are seeking a highly experienced Lead Java Engineer. with deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot, and enterprise-grade microservices architecture. This role requires strong architectural judgment, security-first thinking, and hands-on ownership of backend systems operating at scale.
As a technicalLead, you will drive architecture decisions, define integration and security standards, and ensure systems are scalable, resilient, and compliant, while remaining actively involved in core development.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Leadership
• Lead the design and evolution of microservices architecture usingJava (8/11/17+) and Spring Boot.
• Own end-to-end system architecture, including service boundaries, communication patterns, and failure handling.
• Define and enforce security architecture standards across services (authentication, authorization, data protection).
• Act as the technical authority for design reviews, architecture decisions, and complex integrations.

Security & Identity
• Design and implement secure API access using JWT, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and token-based authentication.
• Enforce zero-trust principles across microservices and external integrations.
• Ensure secure handling of PII and sensitive data, aligned with compliance requirements.
• Guide teams on API security, rate limiting, throttling, and abuse prevention.

Integration & API Management
• Design and govern external integrations (on-prem systems, third-party APIs, cloud services).
• Implement API management strategiesincluding versioning, lifecycle management, and backward compatibility.
• Define idempotent APIs and ensure safe retry behavior across distributed systems.
• Lead the use of API gateways for routing, authentication, rate limiting, and observability.

Event-Driven & Distributed Systems
• Architect and implement event-driven systemsusing Kafka (topics, partitions, consumer groups, schema evolution).
• Ensure exactly-once / at-least-once processing strategies where applicable.
• Design reliable async workflows with proper retry, dead-letter, and error-handling strategies.

Development & Engineering Excellence
• Remain hands-on by developing core services, frameworks, and shared libraries.
• Enforce best practices in code quality, performance optimization, and JVM tuning.
• Conduct architecture-level and code reviews to ensure consistency and scalability.
• Mentor engineers on system design, security, and distributed systems best practices.

Required Skills & Experience
• 10+ years of backend development experience with strong core Java expertise.
• Deep experience with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and building large-scale microservices.
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture, DDD, SOLID principles, and design patterns.
• Proven expertise in security architecture: JWT, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, secure API design.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar messaging systems in production.
• Strong understanding of idempotency, retries, eventual consistency, and distributed system challenges.
• Experience with API management platformsand gateway-based architectures.
• Solid experience integrating on-prem systems, external APIs, and cloud services.
• Strong database knowledge (PostgreSQL/MySQL); exposure to NoSQL is a plus.
• Experience with Docker and deploying services on Kubernetes.

Preferred / Good to Have
• Cloud experience (AWS / Azure / GCP).
• Observability and monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices.
• Experience with resilience patterns: circuit breakers, bulkheads, rate limiting.
• Exposure to performance testing and chaos engineering.

What Makes This Role Different
• Architecture ownership without people management
• Strong focus on security, reliability, and integration
• Opportunity to influence enterprise-wide technical standards
• Hands-on leadership in complex, high-scale distributed systems