Lead, Software Engineer

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd • Miami, FL

8d • Onsite

About The Position

The Royal Caribbean Group’s IT Shipboard Team has an exciting career opportunity for a full time Lead Software Engineer reporting to the Director, Shipboard Engineering. The position is onsite and based in Miramar, Florida. The position is also not eligible for work authorization sponsorship. The Lead Software Engineer provides technical leadership across the Shipboard Engineering portfolio, setting technical direction and driving architecture decisions for fleetwide systems. This role mentors engineers across multiple product teams, owns complex deliverables hands-on, and partners closely with product, infrastructure, network, vendor, and shipboard teams to deliver and operate robust platforms. The Lead Software Engineer is a senior individual contributor who designs and builds foundational platforms, unblocks teams, and ensures solutions meet Royal Caribbean Group standards.

Requirements

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience required.
• Minimum 8 years building production server-side and full-stack systems, with at least 2 years in a Lead or Staff individual contributor capacity.
• Deep expertise in Java 17+ and the Spring Boot 3 ecosystem (WebFlux, R2DBC, Spring Security, Spring Cloud); Kotlin a plus.
• Strong reactive programming background (Project Reactor, backpressure, error-handling, schedulers).
• Hands-on experience with Next.js (App Router), React (including React Query v5), TypeScript, Tailwind, Jest.
• Production experience with at least one relational database (MariaDB / MySQL / Postgres) and one document store (Couchbase / MongoDB).
• Experience with Kubernetes / OpenShift, Helm, and ArgoCD for fleetwide deployment patterns.
• OAuth 2.0 / OIDC integration (ForgeRock or equivalent), including JWT/JWKS, claim-based authorization, and SSO flows.
• Build tooling fluency: Gradle, Maven, npm, lint-staged / pre-commit hooks.
• Observability stack: Splunk, OpenTelemetry, structured logging, distributed tracing.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to author RFCs, ADRs, and runbooks.
• Advanced proficiency in distributed-systems concepts: consistency, isolation, idempotency, retries, backpressure, circuit breakers.
• Strong data-structures and algorithms background, with practical judgment on optimization.
• Sets and enforces engineering standards (TDD, code review, branch hygiene, semantic versioning, commitlint conventions).
• Designs services and platforms for multi-year evolution: feature flags, contract-first APIs, schema migration discipline, sunset plans.
• Fluent in domain-driven design, ports-and-adapters, and event-driven patterns.
• Understands offline-first and intermittent-connectivity tradeoffs (ship-shore sync, conflict resolution, store-and-forward queues).
• Drives TDD across teams, builds test infrastructure, and ensures robust application testing and automation.
• Owns on-call rotation, diagnoses production issues, and builds dashboards and alerting for proactive operations.
• Models systematic debugging, partners with shipboard IT and shoreside ops during incident response, and translates ambiguous reports into reproducible scenarios.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineering talent at all levels.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with a focus on cross-functional teamwork.
• Commitment to fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Nice To Haves

• Kotlin a plus.
• Experience leading remote and nearshore engineering teams is a strong plus.
• Cruise, hospitality, or shipboard systems experience is a plus, not required.

Responsibilities

• Owns end-to-end design and delivery of cross-service initiatives spanning backend, domain-service, and shipboard-data layers.
• Architects and leads implementation of reactive Spring Boot 3 / WebFlux services backed by MariaDB (R2DBC) and Couchbase, plus Next.js 14 / React Query frontends in TypeScript.
• Drives engineering standards across multiple repositories, including TDD, code review depth, observability, performance budgets, and error-handling patterns.
• Leads through code, pairing with engineers on critical paths, unblocking cross-team integration questions, and writing reference implementations.
• Makes platform-shaping decisions on caching, inter-service contracts, schema evolution, and ship-shore synchronization patterns.
• Mentors senior, mid, and junior engineers, driving performance reviews and growth conversations in partnership with the Engineering Manager.
• Owns production reliability across products, leading postmortems and implementing pattern-fixes to prevent recurrence.
• Partners with Enterprise Architecture, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Network, and Product teams to ensure solutions meet RCG standards.
• Leads deployment and cutover for major releases, including fleetwide rollouts, ship conversions, and pilot deployments.
• Builds runbooks and drives improvements to deployment automation, observability (Splunk, OTEL), CI/CD pipelines, and platform-wide tooling.
• Represents Shipboard Engineering in cross-organizational technical forums, translating ship operational constraints into engineering decisions.

Benefits

• competitive compensation and benefits package
• excellent career development opportunities

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior