Backend / Platform Developer Consultant (Temporal & Kubernetes)

Bitovi•Chicago, IL

17d•Remote

About The Position

Bitovi is seeking a Backend / Platform Developer Consultant to join their team, focusing on transforming technology delivery. The role involves building and operating durable, distributed systems for enterprise clients, with a strong emphasis on Java Services, Temporal for workflow orchestration, Kafka for event streaming, and Kubernetes-native platform engineering on AWS. The ideal candidate will have experience building and running enterprise-level applications, a systems engineering mindset, and the ability to own both code and infrastructure. This role is for individuals who want to build exceptional systems, take orchestration, systems engineering, and infrastructure seriously, and contribute ideas for improving delivery processes.

Requirements

Strong working knowledge of Java and the JVM ecosystem (Spring Boot or similar).
Hands-on experience with a durable execution / workflow engine (Temporal preferred, Apache Airflow, Prefect, or similar also relevant), including modeling workflows and activities, handling retries and timeouts, and reasoning about idempotency and failure modes.
Experience designing and operating Kafka-based event streaming systems (topic and partition design, consumer groups, schema management, and reasoning about ordering, delivery guarantees, and consumer lag).
Experience designing and building GraphQL APIs (schema design, resolvers, and performance concerns).
Deep, hands-on AWS experience: architecting, deploying, and operating production systems (EKS, networking, IAM, messaging, and data services).
Solid Kubernetes experience: deploying, operating, and debugging production workloads.
A systems engineering mindset: understanding of complex scaling issues, concurrency, backpressure, caching strategies, and failure modes across distributed systems.
Experience planning and executing migrations (application replatforming, workflow engine migrations, data/schema migrations, or moving workloads between environments with minimal downtime).
A thorough understanding of CI/CD pipelines and GitOps-style delivery.
Experience with observability in practice (logging, metrics, and tracing).
Experience building modern microservice-based or serverless applications.
Database schema design and development expertise.
Candidates must be located in and authorized to work in the United States.

Nice To Haves

Experience with additional backend languages (Go, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, C#, etc.).
Federation experience with GraphQL.
OpenTelemetry experience.
Temporal depth: Running Temporal in production (self-hosted on Kubernetes and/or Temporal Cloud), workflow versioning and patching, safe deployments, long-running workflow migrations, worker deployment and tuning, namespace management, mTLS, and capacity/scaling concerns.
Kafka & event streaming depth: Operating Kafka in production (MSK, Confluent, or self-managed on Kubernetes), Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, schema registry workflows (Avro/Protobuf), migrating between clusters or providers, integrating Kafka with downstream analytical stores, experience with Lambda and Kappa architectures.
Platform / DevOps depth: Building or operating an internal developer platform (IDP), GitOps with ArgoCD (or Flux), infrastructure as code (Terraform/OpenTofu), provisioning AWS resources via Crossplane, ACK, or similar, writing Kubernetes controllers/operators, Helm chart authoring and distribution, secrets management, autoscaling (Karpenter, KEDA), service mesh concepts (Istio, SPIFFE/SPIRE), EKS or comparable managed Kubernetes at scale.
General Interest in working across multiple backend languages.
Additional queueing and messaging technologies (AWS SQS/SNS, RabbitMQ).
API design across paradigms (GraphQL, REST, gRPC).
AuthN/AuthZ and related technologies (sessions, API tokens, JWTs).
Automated testing across the stack (unit, integration, performance/benchmarking).

Responsibilities

Build durable systems by designing and implementing Java services, Temporal workflows, and Kafka-based event pipelines.
Help clients adopt durable execution and event streaming effectively, from initial implementation to production scale.
Lead modernization efforts, including planning and executing large-scale migrations of workflows, services, and data between platforms, clusters, and clouds, prioritizing safety, observability, and minimal disruption.
Own the platform by building and operating Kubernetes-native infrastructure and CI/CD on AWS to enable application teams to ship safely and quickly.
Treat reliability, observability, and repeatability as integral parts of the deliverable.
Consult with clients to build outcome-driven applications and platforms, guiding them through the process, identifying potential problems and unknowns, and tackling challenges.
Travel for client engagements, averaging 3–5 days per quarter.
Engage in opportunities to present at conferences, attend and give training, plan and run meetups, and create content related to their expertise.