Senior Engineering Lead (Java/Microservices/GCP)/Senior Associate Director

We are looking for a Senior Associate Director, Engineering to lead the end-to-end design and delivery of resilient, cloud-native data platforms and microservices.

Key Responsibilities:

• Technical leadership & architecture: Own solution architecture for high-performance data pipelines and microservices, covering non-functional requirements.
• Define and drive modernization roadmaps, ensuring minimal disruption to live services.
• Establish engineering standards for API design, event-driven integration, data modelling, testing strategy, CI/CD and operational readiness.
• Manage technical debt with clear prioritization and measurable outcomes.

Hands-on delivery (Java-centric):

• Architect, Design and build core services using Java (8+), Spring Boot 3, JPA, PostgreSQL and event streaming patterns.
• Lead real-time processing implementations using Apache Flink and/or Apache Beam.
• Partner with engineers in code reviews, pair debugging, performance tuning, and production incident resolution.
• Build automation for engineering efficiency using scripting, tooling, and testing, leveraging Python where needed.

Cloud, data & platform engineering (GCP):

• Drive engineering delivery on GCP: Dataflow, Pub/Sub, GCS, Composer/Airflow, BigQuery and/or ClickHouse, and GKE.
• Own operational excellence for production workloads: monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, reliability improvements and cost optimization.
• Ensure data quality, integrity, lineage and security controls across pipelines and downstream consumption.

People leadership & stakeholder management:

• Coach and mentor engineers across levels; build a culture of craftsmanship, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Communicate effectively with senior stakeholders,translating business outcomes into technical plans and delivery milestones.
• Proactively manage risks, dependencies and delivery impediments with clear mitigation and escalation paths.

Required skills & experience:

• 15+ years in software engineering, including significant experience designing and delivering distributed systems and data-intensive applications.
• Strong hands-on Java experience with Spring Boot, REST/event-driven services, ORM and SQL performance tuning.
• Proven system design skills: microservices patterns, async messaging, idempotency, consistency models, caching, rate limiting, and failure handling.
• Solid experience delivering cloud-native solutions, preferably GCP.
• Strong troubleshooting ability across applications, data, infrastructure and performance layers.
• Clear communicator; able to align architecture decisions with business priorities and operational constraints.