Principal Software Engineer – Java

About the role

As a Principal Software Engineer at tkxel, you will lead the design and evolution of scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems across enterprise, IoT and data‑driven domains. This hands‑on technical leadership position requires deep Java expertise, strong architectural thinking and the ability to guide multiple engineering teams.

Key responsibilities

• Design modular, resilient architectures using Java 17+, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.
• Apply domain‑driven design, event‑driven architecture and micro‑services patterns.
• Provide guidance on JVM behavior, garbage collection, threading, concurrency and performance tuning.
• Profile applications, analyze memory leaks and optimise performance.
• Evaluate blocking vs non‑blocking I/O, synchronous vs asynchronous flows and reactive models.
• Architect real‑time ingestion pipelines with Kafka, MQTT, WebSockets, gRPC or similar technologies.
• Integrate backend services with relational, NoSQL, time‑series databases, data lakes and analytics platforms.
• Collaborate with data engineering and AI/ML teams to define APIs, data contracts and event schemas.
• Promote observability, distributed tracing, monitoring and resilience patterns such as retries, circuit breakers and idempotent services.
• Mentor engineers on system design, code quality, performance tuning and refactoring.
• Participate in technical discovery, pre‑sales discussions and legacy modernization initiatives.

Required profile

• 7+ years of professional software development experience.
• At least 2 years in a technical leadership, system design or architecture‑focused role.
• Strong problem‑solving skills and ability to balance technical quality with delivery speed.

Required skills

• Java 17+
• Spring Boot, Spring Cloud
• Micro‑services, domain‑driven design, event‑driven architecture
• Kafka, MQTT, WebSockets, gRPC
• Relational databases, NoSQL, time‑series databases, data lakes
• JVM performance tuning, garbage collection, concurrency
• Reactive programming, non‑blocking I/O
• Observability, distributed tracing, monitoring
• Cloud‑native, containerisation, serverless concepts
• Project Loom, Virtual Threads, GraalVM (knowledge preferred)