Lead Principal Software Engineer (Java Spring Boot)

Lead Principal Software Engineer to serve as the primary technical authority for designing architecting and delivering high-scale cloud-native enterprise solutions for our client in the Washington DC area. This high-impact role balances strategic technical leadership with direct hands-on execution driving architectural standards domain-driven design and DevSecOps best practices across multiple engineering teams. The ideal candidate will partner closely with product leaders and executive stakeholders to translate complex business vision into secure resilient and high-performance applications leveraging Java Spring Boot Kafka Angular and AWS.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture & Hands-On Engineering: Lead the end-to-end design full-stack development and deployment of complex microservices event-driven architectures and cloud-native solutions using Java Spring Boot Kafka and Angular.
• Technical Leadership & Governance: Establish enterprise engineering standards conduct architectural reviews enforce secure coding practices and mentor engineers across multiple delivery teams.
• Cloud & Integration Strategy: Drive AWS cloud-native solution design leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) robust API management and enterprise integration patterns.
• Platform Capabilities & Reusability: Build reusable platform frameworks SDKs business rules engines and shared capabilities to accelerate delivery and reduce friction across engineering units.
• Operational Excellence & DevSecOps: Define and enforce standards for CI/CD pipelines DevSecOps practices and system observability (logging alerting metrics distributed tracing).
• Data & Messaging Infrastructure: Oversee scalable data modeling complex SQL optimization and Kafka platform administration to support high-throughput messaging and streaming.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Collaborate with Product Owners Solutions Architects and business executives to translate business requirements into technical roadmaps and risk-mitigated delivery plans.

Qualifications

Education

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering IT or equivalent practical experience.

Core Experience

• 10 years of progressive software engineering experience including 8 years of hands-on Java development and 3 years in a technical leadership/principal capacity.

Technical Stack Expertise

Backend:

• Advanced Java
• Spring Boot (IoC auto-configuration custom beans)
• REST APIs
• Microservices architecture

Messaging & Streaming:

• 3 years of hands-on experience with Apache Kafka
• Event-driven design
• Platform administration

Cloud:

• Extensive experience building AWS-native solutions
• Lambda
• S3
• EC2
• API Gateway
• SNS/SQS
• CloudWatch
• CloudFormation

Frontend:

• Hands-on development experience with Angular or modern Web application frameworks.

Data:

• Advanced proficiency in SQL
• Relational and NoSQL database modeling
• Query performance tuning

Architecture Concepts

• Deep mastery of Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
• Bounded contexts
• Configuration-driven patterns
• Resilience engineering
• Circuit breakers
• Fault tolerance
• Retry logic

DevOps & Observability

• CI/CD tools (Git Jenkins Jira)
• Containerization (Docker Kubernetes/OpenShift)
• Monitoring suites (Datadog Splunk Grafana OpenTelemetry)

Leadership & Communication

• Proven track record of influencing cross-team technical decisions.
• Mentoring senior talent.
• Effectively bridging business goals with technical execution.