Lead Principal Software Engineer (Java Spring Boot)

Randstad is seeking a Lead Principal Software Engineer to serve as the primary technical authority for designing, architecting, and delivering high-scale, cloud-native enterprise solutions for our client in the Washington, DC area. This high-impact role balances strategic technical leadership with direct hands-on execution, driving architectural standards, domain-driven design, and DevSecOps best practices across multiple engineering teams. The ideal candidate will partner closely with product leaders and executive stakeholders to translate complex business vision into secure, resilient, and high-performance applications leveraging Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, Angular, and AWS.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture & Hands-On Engineering: Lead the end-to-end design, full-stack development, and deployment of complex microservices, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native solutions using Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, and Angular.
• Technical Leadership & Governance: Establish enterprise engineering standards, conduct architectural reviews, enforce secure coding practices, and mentor engineers across multiple delivery teams.
• Cloud & Integration Strategy: Drive AWS cloud-native solution design leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC), robust API management, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Platform Capabilities & Reusability: Build reusable platform frameworks, SDKs, business rules engines, and shared capabilities to accelerate delivery and reduce friction across engineering units.
• Operational Excellence & DevSecOps: Define and enforce standards for CI/CD pipelines, DevSecOps practices, and system observability (logging, alerting, metrics, distributed tracing).
• Data & Messaging Infrastructure: Oversee scalable data modeling, complex SQL optimization, and Kafka platform administration to support high-throughput messaging and streaming.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Collaborate with Product Owners, Solutions Architects, and business executives to translate business requirements into technical roadmaps and risk-mitigated delivery plans.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, IT, or equivalent practical experience.
• Core Experience: 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience, including 8+ years of hands-on Java development and 3+ years in a technical leadership/principal capacity.
• Technical Stack Expertise:
  • Backend: Advanced Java, Spring Boot (IoC, auto-configuration, custom beans), REST APIs, and microservices architecture.
  • Messaging & Streaming: 3+ years of hands-on experience with Apache Kafka, event-driven design, and platform administration.
  • Cloud: Extensive experience building AWS-native solutions (Lambda, S3, EC2, API Gateway, SNS/SQS, CloudWatch, CloudFormation).
  • Frontend: Hands-on development experience with Angular or modern Web application frameworks.
  • Data: Advanced proficiency in SQL, relational and NoSQL database modeling, and query performance tuning.
• Architecture Concepts: Deep mastery of Domain-Driven Design (DDD), bounded contexts, configuration-driven patterns, and resilience engineering (circuit breakers, fault tolerance, retry logic).
• DevOps & Observability: Hands-on experience with CI/CD tools (Git, Jenkins, Jira), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes/OpenShift), and monitoring suites (Datadog, Splunk, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Leadership & Communication: Proven track record of influencing cross-team technical decisions, mentoring senior talent, and effectively bridging business goals with technical execution.