Job Description & Details
This is a hands-on architecture role where you won't just be drawing diagrams in isolation—you'll actually be building proof-of-concepts, test harnesses, and writing the code to prove your designs work. If you enjoy solving deep distributed systems challenges rather than sitting in endless high-level strategy meetings, this position is worth a serious look.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You will spend your days designing resilient event-driven architectures and figuring out how data flows reliably across distributed services without breaking downstream consumers. Your reality will involve wrestling with Kafka production concerns like contract changes, failure handling, and event replay, while mapping out APIs that serve multiple distinct clients using BFF patterns or GraphQL. You'll also lay down the architectural runway, produce technical documentation, and build functional POCs to validate new technology approaches before the broader engineering team adopts them.
The Core Tech Stack
To survive here, you need deep, battle-tested experience with the Java ecosystem—specifically modern Java 21 running on Spring Boot—alongside heavy production use of Apache Kafka and PostgreSQL. The environment relies on distributed systems principles like event sourcing, Saga patterns, and complex data reconciliation strategies, all deployed on AWS infrastructure. They are also using React Native on the client side, so understanding how backend event streams and APIs feed mobile clients seamlessly is a massive plus.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring team to grill you on real-world failure modes by asking you to walk through a production Kafka outage you personally debugged and resolved, detailing how you handled consumer offsets, poison pill messages, and schema evolution. They will also likely ask you to design a distributed transaction workflow across multiple microservices using a Saga pattern, probing you on how your system handles partial failures and eventual consistency without corrupting the underlying PostgreSQL database. They want to see if you actually own your designs end-to-end or if you just hand off documentation to other teams.
Application Advice
When updating your resume for this role, skip the generic architecture buzzwords and focus heavily on concrete production achievements involving Kafka and distributed transactional patterns. Make sure keywords like event sourcing, Saga patterns, API design, data reconciliation, and Java 21 are explicitly tied to projects where you built working prototypes or managed large-scale migrations. Show them that you write code and test harnesses, not just slide decks.