Job Description & Details
This is a solid, long-term 18-month contract at a massive financial institution based out of Charlotte. You'll be knee-deep in modernizing legacy data systems and moving them over to Google Cloud Platform, which means you're solving real enterprise data scaling problems rather than just building throwaway CRUD apps.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day-to-day will revolve around bridging on-premise systems with GCP. You'll be writing scalable data pipelines, building out transformation libraries using Python and Apache Beam, and handling everything from slow-changing dimensions to data masking. Alongside the data engineering work, you'll also be designing and maintaining high-performance Java applications using Spring, ensuring everything stays performant, secure, and compliant with strict financial regulations.
The Core Tech Stack
You absolutely need strong Java (Java 8+) and Spring framework experience, paired with solid microservices architecture knowledge and RESTful APIs. On the cloud side, 2 to 4 years of hands-on Google Cloud Platform experience is non-negotiable—specifically BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage. Python and Apache Beam are critical for the data transformation layer, and you'll need familiarity with DevOps tooling like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and Gradle to push your code reliably.
Interview Expectations
Expect the interviewers to probe deeply into how you handle concurrency and distributed systems, likely asking you to explain how you'd design a multi-threaded Java application to feed data into a high-throughput stream without bottlenecking. They are secretly testing whether you can write clean, resilient code under heavy load while keeping data integrity intact. You'll also face scenario-based questions about GCP architecture, specifically around optimizing Dataflow jobs and managing state in BigQuery, where they want to see if you understand cost-efficiency and performance tuning at scale.
Application Advice
To get past the automated screening, make sure your resume explicitly highlights your hands-on experience with Java 8+, Spring, and specific GCP services like Dataflow and BigQuery rather than just listing them as buzzwords. Emphasize any past projects where you migrated on-premise data to the cloud or built robust CI/CD pipelines, and make sure your years of experience with both Java and GCP are front and center.