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 technical leadership position requires deep expertise in Java engineering, strong architectural skills, and the ability to guide teams in building future-ready solutions. You will collaborate closely with Java Architects, Solution Architects, DevOps engineers, Product Owners, and engineering teams to deliver 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.
- Apply 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 analysis, and optimize application-level performance.
- 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 processing high-volume sensor and device events, focusing on reliability, 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, distributed tracing, event traceability, and effective monitoring across services.
- Identify bottlenecks through code and architectural reviews, load testing, and performance analysis.
- Advocate clean architecture principles, SOLID design, secure coding, and maintainable engineering practices.
- 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 strategies.
- Work closely with Solution Architects, DevOps, and Product Owners to balance technical quality, delivery speed, and business objectives.
- Participate in technical discovery and pre-sales discussions to evaluate client requirements, risks, and solution approaches.
- Stay current with the Java ecosystem, including Project Loom, Virtual Threads, GraalVM, and cloud-native best practices.
- Support modernization initiatives for legacy Java systems, including migration to cloud-native, containerized, or serverless architectures.

Required Qualifications

- Minimum of 7 years of professional software development experience, including at least 2 years in a technical leadership, system design, or architecture role.
- Strong expertise 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, API gateways, distributed systems, and inter-service communication.
- Familiarity with distributed tracing and monitoring tools such as Zipkin, Jaeger, Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK stack.
- Experience with cloud-native platforms like AWS, Azure, or GCP, preferably with Kubernetes or container orchestration.
- Proficiency in relational and NoSQL databases, with knowledge of time-series databases considered an advantage.
- Understanding of CI/CD pipelines, GitOps, and modern DevOps workflows.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to identify root causes and implement long-term solutions.
- Excellent communication skills, capable of aligning engineering decisions with business goals.
- Collaborative mindset with a passion for mentoring and working within cross-functional agile teams.

Preferred Qualifications

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

This role offers the opportunity to lead innovative projects at the intersection of enterprise software, IoT, and data analytics, driving impactful solutions in a dynamic and collaborative environment.