Java Backend Developer, 5 Years Experience

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Pakistan.

📋 Description

• Design, develop, and maintain backend services utilizing Java 20+ and Spring Boot.

• Create clean, secure, and versioned REST APIs for web, mobile, administrative, partner, and AI systems.

• Evaluate and enhance the structure of Spring Boot applications, including dependency versions, embedded Tomcat configurations, startup behaviors, memory usage, and runtime performance.

• Optimize service architecture, startup behaviors, configurations, and deployment readiness.

• Refactor unstable or weak backend components without disrupting existing functionality.

• Review and enhance backend code quality, error management, validation processes, and performance metrics.

• Investigate production issues across services, APIs, databases, queues, and cloud infrastructure.

• Address Spring/Tomcat-level challenges such as slow startups, failed bean initializations, blocked request threads, timeout misconfigurations, memory pressure, and unhealthy application states.

• Enhance application startup processes, service health checks, logging, retries, timeout management, and failure recovery.

• Identify unstable services, duplicated logic, suboptimal configurations, and risky dependencies.

• Produce clear root-cause analyses for recurring backend failures.

• Assist in defining backend release standards and deployment readiness criteria.

• Work with databases such as MongoDB, PostgreSQL/MySQL, Redis, and Elasticsearch.

• Optimize queries, indexes, schema designs, and data access patterns.

• Support functionalities like course matching, profile enrichment, search, recommendations, and application workflows.

• Enhance backend data consistency across APIs, databases, search indexes, and AI outputs.

• Collaborate confidently with AWS-backed backend environments, utilizing services like EKS/ECS, EC2, Lambda, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, and SQS/SNS, in partnership with DevOps/Cloud engineers.

• Facilitate containerized deployments using Docker and Kubernetes.

• Assess backend infrastructure for cost-effectiveness, security, reliability, and scalability.

• Contribute to reducing unnecessary cloud costs resulting from inefficient services, oversized resources, or inadequate runtime behavior.

• Collaborate with DevOps/Cloud engineers to enhance deployment pipelines and runtime environments.

• Work with message broker technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS SQS/SNS.

• Audit existing message/event flows to identify utilized, unused, broken, or risky components.

• Construct reliable asynchronous workflows for notifications, AI processing, application updates, and partner integrations.

• Integrate third-party services including payment gateways, email/SMS providers, CRMs, AI/ML APIs, and institutional partner systems.

• Develop secure backend services employing Spring Security, OAuth2, JWT, SSO, and role-based access control.

• Engage with identity systems such as Keycloak or similar platforms.

• Enhance API security, permission checks, secrets management, and environment variable hygiene.

• Identify risky public endpoints, exposed credentials, insecure service-to-service access, and vulnerable configurations.

• Apply secure coding practices across backend services.

• Improve backend logging, metrics, alerts, tracing, and health dashboards.

• Utilize tools such as CloudWatch, ELK, Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic, Datadog, Rollbar, or similar for monitoring.

• Simplify the detection of user-impacting failures such as login issues, API failures, slow response times, and broken workflows.

• Assist in defining what constitutes a “healthy backend” for Yuzee.

• Review pull requests and elevate engineering quality across the team.

• Mentor junior and mid-level developers while sustaining delivery momentum.

• Decompose large technical challenges into clear, shippable milestones.

• Produce technical documentation that articulates systems, decisions, risks, and resolutions.

• Advocate against poor technical decisions with evidence and better alternatives.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 5 years of backend engineering experience, with a strong emphasis on Java.

• More than 4 years of practical experience with Spring Boot.

• Proficient in: Java 17 / 21+, Spring Boot, Spring Data, Spring Security, REST API design, Microservices, Docker, CI/CD, Git workflows, and code reviews.

• Strong comprehension of the Spring ecosystem, inclusive of Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Data, Spring configuration, profiles, dependency management, and application lifecycle.

• Practical experience with embedded servlet containers such as Tomcat, including aspects like request handling, thread pools, connection limits, timeouts, and production tuning.

• Experience utilizing Spring Boot Actuator or similar tools for health checks, metrics, readiness/liveness checks, and production diagnostics.

• Strong database experience with at least one relational database: PostgreSQL, MySQL, or RDS.

• Production experience with cloud platforms, preferably AWS.

• Comprehensive understanding of: Authentication and authorization, OAuth2, JWT, SSO, and Role-based access control.

• Solid testing experience with: JUnit 5, Mockito, Integration testing, and API testing.

• Strong database optimization skills — schema design, indexing, and query tuning.

• Proficient in debugging and root-cause analysis.

• Ability to clearly document backend systems, technical risks, architectural decisions, production incidents, and recommended solutions.

• Strong written English skills for asynchronous collaboration.

🏝️ Benefits

• Fully remote work or work from home (ideal for those wanting to spend more time with family).

• Supportive and friendly colleagues.

• Competitive salary packages.

• Opportunity to work in an agile environment.

• Chance to demonstrate leadership skills.

• Exposure to international working environments.

• Potential for company shares based on the success of our product launches.

• Company-sponsored online courses or tech seminars.

• Performance-based bonuses for exceeding expectations.

• Opportunities for promotions to better job roles after a designated period.