Principal Software Engineer-JAVA

As a Principal Software Engineer at tkxel, you will play a pivotal role in designing and evolving scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems across enterprise, IoT, and data-driven domains. This hands-on leadership position requires deep expertise in Java engineering, strong architectural insight, and the ability to guide teams in building robust, future-ready solutions. You will collaborate closely with Java Architects, Solution Architects, DevOps engineers, Product Owners, and engineering teams to develop clean, secure, and scalable applications using modern Java technologies.

Key Responsibilities

- Design and develop modular, resilient application architectures leveraging Java 17+, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud.
- Implement domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, and microservices patterns to enhance scalability and maintainability.
- Provide expert guidance on JVM internals including garbage collection, threading, concurrency, and overall application performance.
- Conduct Java performance profiling, memory leak detection, and optimize applications for efficiency.
- Evaluate trade-offs between blocking/non-blocking I/O, synchronous/asynchronous flows, and reactive programming models.
- Architect and implement real-time data ingestion and integration pipelines using Kafka, MQTT, WebSockets, gRPC, or similar technologies.
- Contribute to IoT backend systems handling high-volume sensor and device events with a focus on reliability, low latency, and scalability.
- Integrate backend services with relational, NoSQL, time-series databases, data lakes, and analytics platforms.
- Collaborate with data engineering and AI/ML teams to define APIs, data contracts, and event schemas supporting analytics and intelligent systems.
- Promote observability through distributed tracing, event traceability, and effective monitoring across services.
- Identify bottlenecks via code and architectural reviews, load testing, and performance analysis.
- Advocate for clean architecture, SOLID principles, secure coding practices, and maintainable engineering standards.
- Design systems incorporating resilience patterns such as graceful degradation, retries, circuit breakers, and idempotent service behavior.
- Mentor engineers on system design, code quality, performance tuning, and refactoring.
- Work alongside Solution Architects, DevOps, and Product Owners to balance technical quality, delivery speed, and business objectives.
- Participate in technical discovery and pre-sales discussions to assess client requirements, risks, and solution approaches.
- Stay current with advancements in the Java ecosystem, including Project Loom, Virtual Threads, GraalVM, and cloud-native best practices.
- Support modernization efforts for legacy Java systems, including migration to cloud-native, containerized, or serverless architectures.

Required Qualifications

- Minimum of 7 years of professional software development experience, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership, system design, or architecture role.
- Strong proficiency in Java 17+, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, JPA/Hibernate, and RESTful API design.
- Deep understanding of concurrency, JVM performance tuning, design patterns, and functional programming concepts in Java.
- Hands-on experience with microservices architecture, API gateways, distributed systems, and inter-service communication.
- Familiarity with distributed tracing and monitoring tools such as Zipkin, Jaeger, Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK stack.
- Cloud-native experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, preferably involving Kubernetes or other container orchestration platforms.
- Proficiency with relational and NoSQL databases, with knowledge of time-series databases considered an advantage.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, GitOps practices, and modern DevOps workflows.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to identify root causes and develop long-term solutions.
- Excellent communication skills to align engineering decisions with business goals.
- Proven mentorship ability and comfortable working in collaborative, cross-functional agile teams.

Preferred Qualifications

- Exposure to IoT protocols such as MQTT or CoAP.
- Experience with reactive frameworks like Spring WebFlux or Vert.x.
- Knowledge of real-time data streaming platforms such as Kafka; AWS Kinesis experience is a plus.

This role offers the opportunity to lead technical innovation in a dynamic environment, working on cutting-edge Java technologies and complex systems that drive enterprise and IoT solutions. If you are passionate about building scalable, maintainable software and mentoring teams, this position is an excellent fit.