Software Developer III - Java/Backend.

Tech Lead Software Engineer (Java Backend) Remote (U.S.) | Full-Time | 12+ Month Contract We're partnering with a well-established enterprise organization seeking a Tech Lead Software Engineer to help drive modernization initiatives, cloud transformation, and AI-enabled engineering practices across critical business platforms. This is a fully remote, long-term contract opportunity with occasional quarterly travel for team collaboration. The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical leader who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges, mentoring developers, and building highly scalable backend systems in AWS. What You'll Be Doing As a Tech Lead Software Engineer, you'll provide technical leadership while remaining actively involved in architecture, development, and delivery. Key responsibilities include: Lead the design and development of scalable backend services using Java and cloud-native technologies. Provide technical direction and architectural guidance to engineering teams. Help modernize legacy applications and migrate services from on-premises environments to AWS. Design and implement event-driven architectures and distributed systems. Partner with Product, Platform, and Engineering teams to align technical solutions with business objectives. Serve as a technical escalation point for complex production and architecture challenges. Drive engineering best practices across coding standards, design reviews, testing, and operational excellence. Champion "build it, run it" ownership and production reliability. Lead adoption of AI-assisted and agentic development practices to improve engineering productivity and quality. Mentor engineers and help elevate overall team capabilities. Required Experience 8+ years of professional software engineering experience. Prior experience serving as a Technical Lead, Lead Engineer, or Senior Individual Contributor. Strong Java backend development experience in enterprise environments. Hands-on AWS experience, including compute, messaging, storage, and cloud-native services. Experience building and supporting production-grade distributed systems. Strong understanding of event-driven architecture, messaging patterns, and service integrations. Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern software delivery practices. Production support experience, including monitoring, troubleshooting, and incident response. Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical decisions across teams. Preferred Experience Modernization and cloud migration initiatives. Domain-Driven Design (DDD) concepts and microservices architecture. AI-assisted software development tools and agentic engineering workflows. Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, ECS, or serverless technologies. Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CDK, or similar tools. Observability tools such as Datadog, New Relic, or Prometheus. NoSQL technologies including MongoDB or Redis. API management and integration platforms. Experience working in highly regulated environments. Why This Opportunity? Long-term, stable contract engagement (12+ months). Fully remote position within the U.S. Opportunity to influence enterprise architecture and modernization efforts. Work with cloud-native technologies, AWS, and emerging AI-enabled engineering practices. High-impact technical leadership role with visibility across the organization. Location: Remote (U.S.) Duration: 12+ Month Contract Schedule: Full-Time Travel: Occasional quarterly meetings Experience Level: Senior / Tech Lead If you're an experienced Java backend engineer who thrives in technical leadership roles and enjoys helping organizations modernize their platforms, we'd love to connect.