Lead Java Developer

Job Description: Location: Edinburgh and Leeds, UK. Mandatory Skills & Experience Java 17: Functional programming features, records, sealed classes, performance considerations. Spring Boot: Auto-configuration, profiles, Spring Data/JPA, WebFlux (nice), validation, actuator.

SQL & RDBMS: Schema design, indexes, query optimization, transactions, isolation levels. Apache Kafka: Topic design, partitioning strategy, consumer groups, offsets, retries/DLQ, schema registry/Avro/Protobuf. GCP: Familiarity with Cloud Run or GKE, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Secret Manager, IAM, VPC; cost/perf trade-offs.

DevOps Tooling: Git, CI/CD (Jenkins/GitHub Actions/GitLab), Docker; Kubernetes fundamentals; IaC awareness. Software Engineering Fundamentals: DDD concepts, SOLID, testing (unit/integration), performance profiling, and security basics (OAuth2/JWT, OWASP Top 10). Non-Mandatory (Nice-to-Have): MongoDB (schema design, indexes, aggregation).

Messaging systems: RabbitMQ, GCP Pub/Sub, or SQS/SNS. Caching & Performance: Redis, Hazelcast; rate limiting; API gateways (Kong/Apigee). Observability: Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing.

Build & Infra: Maven/Gradle tuning, Helm charts, Terraform, Argo CD. Testing: Testcontainers, WireMock/MockServer, contract testing (Pact), chaos testing basics. Security: mTLS, secrets rotation, vulnerability scanning (Snyk/Trivy), supply chain security.