Job Description — Senior Associate Director, Engineering (GCB4)
Profile focus: Strong technology leader with proven system design capability and hands-on Java engineering experience.
Role purpose
Lead the end-to-end design and delivery of resilient, cloud-native data platforms and microservices. You’ll set technical direction, modernize legacy estates, and stay close enough to the code to unblock teams and raise engineering quality—especially in Java/Spring Boot and distributed system design.
Key responsibilities
Technical leadership & architecture
- Own solution architecture for high-performance data pipelines and microservices, covering non-functional requirements (resilience, scalability, latency, observability, security).
- Define and drive modernization roadmaps (re-platform, refactor, microservices decomposition), 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 (or any RDBMS ), and event streaming patterns.
- Lead real-time processing implementations using Apache Flink (and/or Apache Beam) where appropriate.
- Partners with engineers in code reviews, pair debugging, performance tuning, and production incident resolution.
- Build automation for engineering efficiency (scripting, tooling, 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 (recent and demonstrable) with Spring Boot, REST/event-driven services, ORM (JPA/Hibernate), 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 (or equivalent cloud with ability to translate).
- Strong troubleshooting ability across applications, data, infrastructure and performance layers.
- Clear communicator; able to align architecture decisions with business priorities and operational constraints.
Desirable / nice to have
- Kubernetes and deployment tooling: GKE, Helm, CI/CD pipelines.
- Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Stackdriver/Cloud Monitoring, distributed tracing.
- Security practices in cloud/Kubernetes: secrets management, IAM, network segmentation, secure SDLC.
- Front-end exposure (helpful, not essential): React, TypeScript.
- MongoDB and polyglot persistence experience.
