Principal Software Engineer-Java

Principal Software Engineer

As an Principal Software Engineer at tkxel, you will contribute to the design and evolution of scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems across enterprise, IoT, and data-driven domains. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone with strong Java engineering depth, solid architectural thinking, and the ability to guide teams in building future-ready systems.

You will work closely with Java Architects, Solution Architects, DevOps engineers, Product Owners, and engineering teams to design clean, secure, and scalable solutions using modern Java technologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and contribute to modular, resilient application architectures using Java 17+, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud.
  
• Apply domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, and microservices patterns to improve scalability and maintainability.
  
• Provide technical guidance on JVM behavior, garbage collection, threading, concurrency, and application performance.
  
• Support Java performance profiling, memory leak analysis, and application-level optimization.
  
• Evaluate trade-offs between blocking and non-blocking I/O, synchronous and asynchronous flows, and reactive programming models.
  
• Architect and implement real-time data ingestion and integration flows using Kafka, MQTT, WebSockets, gRPC, or similar technologies.
  
• Contribute to IoT backend systems that process high-volume sensor and device events with a focus on reliability, latency, and scalability.
  
• Integrate backend services with relational databases, NoSQL databases, time-series databases, data lakes, and analytics platforms.
  
• Collaborate with data engineering and AI/ML teams to define APIs, data contracts, and event schemas that support analytics and intelligent systems.
  
• Promote observability, distributed tracing, event traceability, and effective monitoring across services.
  
• Identify potential bottlenecks through code reviews, architectural reviews, load testing, and performance analysis.
  
• Advocate for clean architecture, SOLID principles, secure coding, and maintainable engineering practices.
  
• Design systems with resilience patterns such as graceful degradation, retries, circuit breakers, and idempotent service behavior.
  
• Mentor engineers on system design, code quality, performance tuning, and refactoring decisions.
  
• Collaborate with Solution Architects, DevOps, and Product Owners to balance technical quality, delivery speed, and business goals.
  
• Participate in technical discovery and pre-sales discussions to help evaluate client requirements, risks, and possible solution approaches.
  
• Stay updated on the Java ecosystem, including Project Loom, Virtual Threads, GraalVM, and modern cloud-native practices.
  
• Support modernization initiatives for legacy Java systems, including migration to cloud-native, containerized, or serverless architectures.
  

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software development experience, including 2+ years in a technical leadership, system design, or architecture-focused role.
  
• Strong command of Java 17+, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, JPA/Hibernate, and RESTful API design.
  
• Solid understanding of concurrency, JVM performance tuning, design patterns, and functional programming concepts in Java.
  
• Hands-on experience with microservices, API gateways, distributed systems, and service-to-service communication.
  
• Experience with distributed tracing and monitoring tools such as Zipkin, Jaeger, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or similar stacks.
  
• Cloud-native experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, preferably with Kubernetes or container orchestration platforms.
  
• Proficiency with relational databases, NoSQL databases, and preferably time-series databases.
  
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, GitOps practices, and modern DevOps workflows.
  
• Exposure to IoT protocols such as MQTT or CoAP is a strong plus.
  
• Experience with reactive frameworks such as Spring WebFlux or Vert.x is a plus.
  
• Understanding of real-time data streaming platforms such as Kafka; AWS Kinesis experience is a plus.
  
• Strong analytical and problem-solving mindset with the ability to identify patterns, root causes, and long-term solutions.
  
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to align engineering decisions with business goals.
  
• Mentorship-driven, collaborative, and comfortable working in cross-functional agile teams.