CloudKeeper - Associate Technical Lead - Java

CLOUDKEEPER - ENGINEERING

Role

Associate Technical Lead - Java : 7 - 10 yrs experience | Leads 5 - 7 engineers - Core Java / J2EE - System Design - Product Thinking | AI-Assisted Dev

We're looking for someone who can get that architecture right, build it hands-on, and grow the 5 - 7 engineers who ship it with them - without losing a step on either the design or the calendar.

System Design :

• Design systems, not just code.
• Own high- and low-level design for distributed systems handling large-scale billing and usage data across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Weigh trade-offs - cost vs. latency vs. reliability - and defend the reasoning, not just the diagram.
• Define APIs, data models, and integration patterns for queuing, caching, and event-driven flows.
• Run architecture reviews; surface tech debt early and own the remediation plan, not just the finding.

Product Thinking :

• What we specifically probe for in the system design round.
• Turn an ambiguous ask into a scoped design - the right clarifying questions before the right diagram.
• Weigh build-vs-buy and MVP-vs-scale against real timelines and business impact, not textbook completeness.
• Notice when a design is solving the wrong problem, and say so - to us, before the customer does.
• Shape the road-map with Product, not just execute what lands in the backlog.

Team Leadership :

• Own outcomes for 5 - 7 engineers.
• Mentor and grow a team of 5 to 7 engineers; run 1 : 1s that move careers forward, not just status updates.
• Set clear goals, give direct feedback, and address under-performance before it drifts.
• Build a culture where design and code reviews raise the bar instead of gate-keeping.
• Resolve conflict and re-balance workload before it becomes a delivery problem.

Delivery & Time Management :

• Protect the calendar as hard as the codebase.
• Own delivery across parallel work-streams; size realistically and flag risk early, not at the deadline.
• Run Agile ceremonies that unblock the team instead of consuming its week.
• Split time deliberately between hands-on coding and leadership - both slip when this is left to chance.

Hands-on Engineering :

• Still writing the code you review.
• Ship production Java/J2EE code and set the standard for the pull requests you review.
• Build with Spring, Hibernate, and REST; work across MySQL/Oracle and MongoDB/DynamoDB.
• Use AI coding tools deliberately - Kiro, Claude Code - to move faster, without shipping code the team can't explain.

Must have :

• B.E./B.Tech/MCA with 7 - 10 years of hands-on experience in Core Java and J2EE, end-to-end in an Agile environment.
• A track record of owning system architecture you can defend in detail - real decisions, real trade-offs, real failures you designed around.
• 2 years leading a team of 5 - 7 engineers, with evidence of people you've grown, not just projects you've shipped.
• Product judgment : comfortable pushing back on a requirement when the trade-off doesn't hold up.
• Strong time management - proof you can run delivery and people management in parallel without either slipping.
• Hands-on with Spring, Hibernate, REST, TDD, and CI (Maven/Gradle/Jenkins).
• Everyday, hands-on use of AI coding tools (Kiro, Claude Code, etc.), with the judgment to know where an AI/LLM component genuinely belongs in a design - not just where it's trendy.
• Solid grounding in design patterns, OOAD, and integration patterns for queuing and caching.
• Comfortable across relational and NoSQL stores - MySQL/Oracle plus MongoDB/DynamoDB/Cassandra.
• Communicates design decisions clearly to engineers, PMs, and leadership alike.
• Experience owning production incidents end-to-end - triage, mitigation, and postmortems that prevent a repeat, not just patch the symptom.

Good to have :

• Cloud experience on AWS/Azure/GCP, or FinOps / cost-optimization domain exposure - it's literally what we do.
• Microservices, event-driven architecture.
• Experience in a high-growth product company.
• Calm under pressure, with a genuinely analytical mind.