Senior Director Backend Engineer (Java)

Senior Director, Platform Engineering (Individual Contributor)

Quest v2 Migration Technical Lead

Location: Pune, India (Hybrid)
Experience: 10+ Years

About the Role

We are seeking a hands-on technical leader to drive the modernization of Quest, a high-volume event and workflow-processing platform handling tens of millions of events daily. This is an individual contributor role, comparable to a Principal or Senior Staff Engineer, responsible for leading the technical execution of the Quest v2 migration while guiding a team of approximately 10 engineers and QA professionals.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of Quest v2 migration initiatives.
• Develop production-grade Java and Spring Boot applications for high-volume, event-driven systems.
• Define engineering patterns for event processing, state management, testing, deployment, and recovery.
• Design and optimize Kafka-based event processing, ensuring scalability, reliability, idempotency, and fault tolerance.
• Resolve application and MySQL scalability bottlenecks through schema optimization, caching, partitioning, and asynchronous processing.
• Conduct architecture reviews, code reviews, performance tuning, and production troubleshooting.
• Establish migration strategies, including coexistence, cutover, rollback, reconciliation, and validation between Quest v1 and Quest v2.
• Drive production readiness, resilience testing, and operational excellence.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with significant hands-on development and technical leadership.
• Strong expertise in Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, and event-driven architectures.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including concurrency, eventual consistency, idempotency, event ordering, fault tolerance, and horizontal scaling.
• Strong MySQL performance tuning, schema design, and scalability experience.
• Experience with Redis, REST APIs, asynchronous workflows, and high-volume production systems.
• Proven experience modernizing legacy platforms and migrating live production workloads.
• Strong troubleshooting, performance optimization, and root-cause analysis capabilities.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and containerized Java applications.
• Expertise in distributed workflows, Domain-Driven Design, and microservices modernization.
• Experience with observability, distributed tracing, resilience frameworks, and JVM performance tuning.
• Background in FinTech, Insurance, Lead Generation, or other large-scale transaction-processing platforms.

What We're Looking For

• A highly technical leader who leads through hands-on contribution and engineering excellence.
• Strong decision-maker with the ability to balance scalability, reliability, delivery timelines, and migration risk.
• Passion for building resilient, scalable systems and mentoring teams through technical leadership.

Note: This role does not include people management, product management, project management, infrastructure ownership, or Kubernetes administration. It focuses on technical leadership, architecture, migration execution, scalability, reliability, and production readiness.