Role: Java Developer w/AI experience Location: Chicago, IL Minimum 12+ years experience needed Local candidates preferred
Top Required Skills:
Java (Spring Boot)
Microservices
AWS
RestAPI
AI (Claude or Copilot)
DevOps
Kafka
Job responsibilities: • Leads end-to-end delivery of full stack solutions using Java Spring Boot, GraphQL/REST, and AWS-managed services, from design through production support. • Drives architecture and design reviews, defining service boundaries, API contracts, data models, and integration patterns. • Develops secure, high-quality, production-grade code; conducts thorough code reviews; sets and enforces engineering standards. • Builds and maintains highly available and scalable services with strong operational excellence: reliability, performance, cost awareness, and maintainability. • Implements and governs authentication/authorization using OIDC/OAuth2, token validation, scopes/claims, and service-to-service security patterns. • Establishes robust observability practices (structured logging, metrics, tracing), incident response readiness (runbooks). • Evaluates vendor and internal solutions (including architectural fit, security posture, scalability, and operability) and guides adoption decisions
Required qualifications, capabilities, and skills: • Minimum 12+ years applied full stack engineering experience delivering and operating production systems; experience as a senior/lead capacity (technical leadership, design ownership). • Java Spring Boot expertise: building APIs, dependency injection, validation, error handling, and performance tuning. • GraphQL proficiency: schema design, resolvers, federation/composition patterns (where applicable), query performance (N+1 mitigation, caching), and API governance/versioning strategy. • REST proficiency: OpenAPI-style contract design, pagination/filtering, idempotency, backward compatibility, and consumer-driven API evolution. • OIDC/OAuth2: hands-on implementation with JWTs, refresh/access token flows, scopes/claims, secure session patterns, and least-privilege access control. • AWS experience (hands-on): designing, deploying, and operating cloud-native applications; strong understanding of IAM, networking basics, and operational tooling (logs/metrics/alarms). • Data layer expertise: • AWS Aurora PostgreSQL: advanced SQL, indexing, query optimization, migrations, and transactional design. • AWS Neptune: gremlin, graph modeling, query patterns, and performance considerations for graph workloads. • Event-driven systems: • AWS Kafka (MSK): topics/partitions, consumer groups, schema evolution, ordering/at-least-once semantics, idempotency, retries/DLQs, and operational monitoring. • CI/CD and quality: • Strong Git practices, automated testing (unit/integration/contract/e2e), code quality gates, and release confidence practices (feature flags, progressive rollout where applicable). • AI-assisted engineering (MUST): • Demonstrated proficiency using Claude Code and/or GitHub Copilot to accelerate development, debugging, refactoring, test generation, and documentation—while ensuring correctness, security, and maintainability (e.g., validating outputs, avoiding sensitive data leakage, and adhering to team standards).
Applicant Notices & Disclaimers
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At SPECTRAFORCE, we are committed to maintaining a workplace that ensures fair compensation and wage transparency in adherence with all applicable state and local laws.This position's pay range is $55.00/hr - $59.00/hr.
