Sr System Engineer - Technical Lead

ZipStaff•Washington, DC

1d•Remote

About The Position

ZipStaff is hiring a Sr System Engineer - Technical Lead (Java / Distributed Systems) for a major U.S. passenger rail transportation organization based in Washington, DC. This hands-on technical leadership role focuses on architecting reusable frameworks, rules-driven engines, event-driven pipelines, and shared libraries for business-critical services using Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, and AWS. The position is primarily remote. In-person SAFe PI Planning is required, along with occasional milestone visits to offices in Washington, DC, Wilmington, DE, or Philadelphia, PA. This is an 11-month W2 contract.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or Engineering, or equivalent.
10+ years of software engineering experience, including 8+ years of Java experience.
5+ years building enterprise microservices with Java, Spring Boot, and the Spring ecosystem.
3+ years as a hands-on Senior Technical Lead, Lead, or Principal Engineer.
Expertise with Apache Kafka, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design (DDD), and fault-tolerant integration patterns.
Strong relational and NoSQL database tuning skills, complex SQL, and knowledge of AWS core services.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, or Red Hat OpenShift.
Experience with Splunk, Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch, or OpenTelemetry.
Exposure to Angular front-end integration.

Responsibilities

Lead the design, implementation, and deployment of resilient, high-throughput microservices and shared components in Java and Spring Boot.
Build configuration-driven rules engines, common SDKs, and shared libraries to standardize delivery.
Develop Kafka producers, consumers, and messaging pipelines with retries, circuit breakers, and dead-letter queues.
Design scalable relational and NoSQL data models and resolve database performance issues.
Build containerized applications on AWS using services such as Lambda, S3, EC2, API Gateway, and SQS/SNS, with infrastructure as code and DevSecOps CI/CD.
Implement distributed tracing, metrics, logging, secrets management, and API security using OAuth2 and JWT.
Lead code reviews, troubleshoot complex defects, and mentor engineers.