Tech Lead Software Engineer (Java Backend)
Remote (U.S.) | Full-Time | Contract
We're partnering with a well-established enterprise organization seeking a Tech Lead Software Engineer to help drive modernization initiatives, cloud transformation, and AI-enabled engineering practices across critical business platforms.
This is a fully remote, long-term contract opportunity with occasional quarterly travel for team collaboration. The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical leader who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges, mentoring developers, and building highly scalable backend systems in AWS.
What You'll Be Doing
As a Tech Lead Software Engineer, you'll provide technical leadership while remaining actively involved in architecture, development, and delivery.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead the design and development of scalable backend services using Java and cloud-native technologies.
- Provide technical direction and architectural guidance to engineering teams.
- Help modernize legacy applications and migrate services from on-premises environments to AWS.
- Design and implement event-driven architectures and distributed systems.
- Partner with Product, Platform, and Engineering teams to align technical solutions with business objectives.
- Serve as a technical escalation point for complex production and architecture challenges.
- Drive engineering best practices across coding standards, design reviews, testing, and operational excellence.
- Champion "build it, run it" ownership and production reliability.
- Lead adoption of AI-assisted and agentic development practices to improve engineering productivity and quality.
- Mentor engineers and help elevate overall team capabilities.
Required Experience
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
- Prior experience serving as a Technical Lead, Lead Engineer, or Senior Individual Contributor.
- Strong Java backend development experience in enterprise environments.
- Hands-on AWS experience, including compute, messaging, storage, and cloud-native services.
- Experience building and supporting production-grade distributed systems.
- Strong understanding of event-driven architecture, messaging patterns, and service integrations.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern software delivery practices.
- Production support experience, including monitoring, troubleshooting, and incident response.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical decisions across teams.
Preferred Experience
- Modernization and cloud migration initiatives.
- Domain-Driven Design (DDD) concepts and microservices architecture.
- AI-assisted software development tools and agentic engineering workflows.
- Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, ECS, or serverless technologies.
- Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CDK, or similar tools.
- Observability tools such as Datadog, New Relic, or Prometheus.
- NoSQL technologies including MongoDB or Redis.
- API management and integration platforms.
- Experience working in highly regulated environments.
Why This Opportunity?
- Long-term, stable contract engagement (12+ months).
- Fully remote position within the U.S.
- Opportunity to influence enterprise architecture and modernization efforts.
- Work with cloud-native technologies, AWS, and emerging AI-enabled engineering practices.
- High-impact technical leadership role with visibility across the organization.
Location: Remote (U.S.)
Duration: 2-3-month contract
Schedule: Full-Time
Travel: Occasional meetings
Experience Level: Senior / Tech Lead
If you're an experienced Java backend engineer who thrives in technical leadership roles and enjoys helping organizations modernize their platforms, we'd love to connect.
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