Lead, Software Engineer (Streaming Development)
If you east, sleep and breathe distributed computing (Java) and Kafka Streams and if you've ever architected cloud-native solutions then you will want to read about the opportunity below.
We're talking about a full-time, permanent (hybrid onsite) gig in downtown Chicago. Not some corporate hamster wheel - this is a place where you'll be shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the sharpest engineering minds in the city. You'll help shape the backbone of a data-driven enterprise, building scalable, cloud-first systems that hum at high velocity.
What You'll Actually Do
• Architect and build secure, scalable, and resilient cloud-native systems that don't fall over when the traffic spikes.
• Dive deep into requirements, poke holes in assumptions, and write code that's clean, tested, and battle-ready.
• Lead code reviews that aren't just rubber stamps - you'll mentor, challenge, and elevate your team.
• Write unit and integration tests that catch bugs before they become production nightmares.
• Be the voice of reason when it comes to risk, performance, and system design.
• Collaborate like a pro - with devs, architects, product owners - to drive the data-first strategy across the org.
What You Bring to the Table
• 7+ years of hands-on Java engineering - not just writing code, but crafting systems.
• 5+ years building high-speed, data-centric solutions that scale like a beast.
• Deep experience with distributed computing frameworks: Kafka Streams, FLINK, Spark - you know the drill.
• You've wrangled message brokers like Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, or Kinesis - and lived to tell the tale.
• You speak fluent AWS: VPCs, EC2, RDS, IAM, KMS, security groups - you've built in the cloud and know how to keep it secure.
• You write tests like you mean it - JUnit, Citrus, whatever gets the job done.
• Git workflows? You've mastered them. DevOps tools like Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, Kubernetes? You've deployed, scaled, and debugged with them.
• You've got eyes on your systems - Splunk, ElasticSearch, Prometheus, AppDynamics - you monitor like a hawk.
• You've got the paper (BS in Computer Science or similar), but more importantly, you've got the scars and stories from the trenches.
