Associate Technical Lead - Java

CLOUDKEEPER • ENGINEERING

Associate Technical Lead Java

710 yrs experience • Leads 57 engineers • Core Java / J2EE • System Design • Product Thinking • AI-Assisted Dev

We are looking for someone who can get that architecture right, build it hands-on, and grow the 57 engineers

who ship it with them — without losing a step on either the design or the calendar.

01 System Design

Design systems, not just code

• Own high- and low-level design for distributed systems handling large-scale billing and usage data across

AWS, Azure, and GCP.

• Weigh trade-offs — cost vs. latency vs. reliability — and defend the reasoning, not just the diagram.
• Define APIs, data models, and integration patterns for queuing, caching, and event-driven flows.
• Run architecture reviews; surface tech debt early and own the remediation plan, not just the finding.

02 Product Thinking

What we specifically probe for in the system design round

• Turn an ambiguous ask into a scoped design — the right clarifying questions before the right diagram.
• Weigh build-vs-buy and MVP-vs-scale against real timelines and business impact, not textbook

completeness.

• Notice when a design is solving the wrong problem, and say so — to us, before the customer does.
• Shape the roadmap with Product, not just execute what lands in the backlog.

03 Team Leadership

Own outcomes for 5–7 engineers

• Mentor and grow a team of 5 to 7 engineers; run 1:1s that move careers forward, not just status updates.
• Set clear goals, give direct feedback, and address underperformance before it drifts.
• Build a culture where design and code reviews raise the bar instead of gatekeeping.
• Resolve conflict and re-balance workload before it becomes a delivery problem.

04 Delivery & Time Management

Protect the calendar as hard as the codebase

• Own delivery across parallel work-streams; size realistically and flag risk early, not at the deadline.
• Run Agile ceremonies that unblock the team instead of consuming its week.
• Split time deliberately between hands-on coding and leadership — both slip when this is left to chance.

05 Hands-on Engineering

Still writing the code you review

• Ship production Java/J2EE code and set the standard for the pull requests you review.

• Build with Spring, Hibernate, and REST; work across MySQL/Oracle and MongoDB/DynamoDB.

• Use AI coding tools deliberately — Kiro, Claude Code — to move faster, without shipping code the team

can't explain.

Must have

• B.E./B.Tech/MCA with 7–10 years of hands-on experience in Core Java and J2EE, end-to-end in an Agile

environment.

• A track record of owning system architecture you can defend in detail — real decisions, real trade-offs, real

failures you designed around.

• 2+ years leading a team of 5–7 engineers, with evidence of people you've grown, not just projects you've

shipped.

• Product judgment: comfortable pushing back on a requirement when the trade-off doesn't hold up.
• Strong time management — proof you can run delivery and people management in parallel without either

slipping.

• Hands-on with Spring, Hibernate, REST, TDD, and CI (Maven/Gradle/Jenkins).
• Every day, hands-on use of AI coding tools (Kiro, Claude Code, etc.), with the judgment to know where an

AI/LLM component genuinely belongs in a design — not just where it's trendy.

• Solid grounding in design patterns, OOAD, and integration patterns for queuing and caching.
• Comfortable across relational and NoSQL stores — MySQL/Oracle plus MongoDB/DynamoDB/Cassandra.
• Communicates design decisions clearly to engineers, PMs, and leadership alike.
• Experience owning production incidents end-to-end — triage, mitigation, and postmortems that prevent a

repeat, not just patch the symptom.

Good to have

• Cloud experience on AWS/Azure/GCP, or FinOps/cost-optimization domain exposure — it's literally what

we do.

• Microservices, event-driven architecture.
• Experience in a high-growth product company.
• Calm under pressure, with a genuinely analytical mind.