Tech Lead Software Engineer (Java Backend)

Remote (U.S.) | Full-Time | 12+ Month 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: 12+ Month Contract
Schedule: Full-Time
Travel: Occasional quarterly 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.