Software Engineer Lead

Software Engineer Lead
Contractor
Strongsville, OH, Pittsburgh, PA

End Client: PNC Bank
8 to 10 Years experience

Technical Skills
Kafka Expert Level
o Kafka architecture (brokers, partitions, topics, producers, consumers)
o Kafka Streams (KStreams, KTables)
o Topic configurations (retention, replication, partitioning)
o Exactly-once vs at-least-once processing
o Schema management (Avro, Protobuf, JSON)
o Kafka Connect
o Testing using TopologyTestDriver & TestContainers
Java / J2EE Expert Level
Apache basics
Strong knowledge of:
o Spring Boot
o Spring Cloud
o Hibernate
o REST APIs
Experience building REST APIs using Spring Boot
Spring Data / Spring Data JPA
Unit testing with JUnit / Spock / Mockito
SQL & NoSQL databases
CI/CD using Jenkins
Oracle & MSSQL query writing
Git & automated testing tools
Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift (OCP)
FLEX / NICE TO HAVE
Apache Flink or KSQLDB
GitHub Actions / GitLab CI
Event-driven architecture
RabbitMQ
ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)
OpenTelemetry
Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, JMX)
Dynatrace
SAFE Agile / Scrum exposure
Kafka or Java Certifications
Roles & Responsibilities
Lead development of microservices-based applications
Design and implement Kafka Streams solutions
Develop REST APIs using Spring Boot
Integrate Kafka with external systems (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra)
Implement CI/CD pipelines
Ensure high-quality code with automated testing
Provide technical leadership and mentorship
Troubleshoot performance and distributed processing issues
Collaborate with business and offshore teams
Soft Skills
Strong problem-solving ability
Leadership & mentoring capability
Excellent verbal & written communication
Ability to work independently
Education &Bachelors Degree in Computer Science (or equivalent experience)