IT - Java Developer - Senior
About The Position
The Senior Java Developer will join the thinkorswim® Performance Engineering team and independently plan and deliver performance and resiliency initiatives for a Java-based trading platform. The role focuses on latency, scalability, reliability, and resiliency, building workloads and tools, identifying code and system bottlenecks, and recommending improvements across client, server, gateway, infrastructure, and cloud environments. The developer is expected to have deep Core Java knowledge and strong diagnostic skills. They will read source code, analyze JVM and system behavior, understand production traffic, and turn findings into code, configuration, capacity, and design recommendations. Candidates will work on-site four days per week. Southlake is the preferred location, with Ann Arbor as a backup location. This is a contract-to-hire position; candidates must not require sponsorship now or in the future.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering.
- At least 5 years of Java, J2EE (client- and server-side), Spring Framework, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud development experience.
- At least 5 years of experience with distributed systems/software, real-time processing, relational database systems, and messaging systems.
- Linux background and experience with shell scripting.
- Strong experience with concurrency and multithreading.
- Understanding of data structures, algorithms, and design patterns.
- Experience troubleshooting and diagnosing JVM issues, including thread dumps, garbage collection, and memory management.
- Experience with resiliency implementations, including circuit breakers, shapers, load balancers, and failover.
- Experience with Java-based, high-throughput, low-latency, real-time systems.
- Experience using Splunk, Grafana, or other monitoring tools.
- Strong analytical, organizational, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
- Knowledge of professional software engineering practices and full software development life-cycle best practices, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations.
- Highly motivated, self-starting individual able to make effective independent decisions.
- Ability to analyze problems, evaluate alternatives, and provide solutions consistent with business objectives and strategy.
- Must not require employment sponsorship currently or in the future.
Nice To Haves
- Financial Services industry experience is strongly preferred.
- Experience with trading platforms is a plus.
- DevOps and build automation experience.
- Experience with cloud computing platforms, including AWS and Google Cloud.
- Experience using AI tools with Visual Studio or IntelliJ IDEA.
Responsibilities
- Code performance test scripts in Core Java and develop and maintain Unix shell- and Python-based frameworks.
- Develop custom tooling, create mock services, and maintain the tool repository.
- Gather and analyze performance requirements with project owners and stakeholders.
- Support the writing of performance test plans; execute performance tests; monitor application behavior; and analyze and identify code-level performance bottlenecks.
- Identify and collect key system performance metrics.
- Address client-side and server-side performance issues and recommend performance, resiliency, and tuning enhancements.
- Support solutions for production monitoring.
- Quickly understand a complex code base and work within ambiguous design constraints.
- Develop a deeper understanding of the architecture to identify solutions that provide the best client experience in a scalable way.
- Work with the Performance QA team on test runs to stress system capabilities and identify code-level bottlenecks.
