Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-duty backend modernization gig focused on untangling legacy MS SQL systems and dragging them into a modern Kafka and GraphQL reality. If you enjoy refactoring messy enterprise codebases without breaking downstream clients, you will actually have fun here.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You'll spend your days knee-deep in Java and Spring Boot, ripping out old data access layers and replacing them with clean GraphQL endpoints while keeping existing REST contracts intact. Half the battle will be making sense of legacy Microsoft SQL Server stored procedures and translating that logic into real-time Kafka event streams. You'll own features end-to-end, meaning you write the code, wire up the tests, push it through CI/CD, and figure out why it broke in production at 3 PM.
The Core Tech Stack
You need absolute fluency in Java and Spring Boot, paired with hands-on production experience in GraphQL and Apache Kafka. The team relies heavily on Kafka for event-driven synchronization and schema evolution using Avro, so you can't just know the basics of messaging—you need to understand consumer groups, offsets, and error handling. T-SQL tuning is also a big deal here because you'll be migrating data models out of MS SQL Server without blowing up the current architecture.
Interview Expectations
Expect the interviewers to drop a tricky distributed systems scenario on you, like asking how you would guarantee message ordering and handle dead-letter queues in Kafka while simultaneously migrating a monolithic SQL database to a federated GraphQL schema. They are testing your battle scars, so be ready to talk about past production outages you've caused and how you fixed them. They'll also probe your practical use of AI tools to make sure you use LLMs to write better code rather than blindly copying garbage into the codebase.
Application Advice
Skip the generic template resume and explicitly highlight your experience with Spring for GraphQL, Kafka event streams, and legacy database refactoring right at the top. Make sure exact keywords like 'Spring Boot', 'Kafka Streams', 'T-SQL', and 'GraphQL federation' are baked into your work history bullets so you easily clear the ATS filters. If you have successfully migrated a legacy monolith to a modern event-driven architecture in a past role, put that front and center.