Expert Forward Deployment Engineer

Project description

The project is focused on improving the security, release reliability, maintainability, and operational resilience of business-critical banking applications.

Forward Deployed Engineers will conduct targeted, hands-on engagements with development teams that are facing challenges with vulnerability remediation, automated testing, legacy technology, production stability, or achieving a safe and rapid release cadence.

The role combines senior software engineering, Dev Ops, SRE, test automation, application security, and legacy modernization. Approximately 70% of the work involves hands-on coding and configuration.

The technical scope includes building effective automated test suites, remediating security vulnerabilities, performing dependency and reachability analysis, upgrading Java and NPM runtimes, modernizing Spring and legacy middleware applications, improving CI/CD pipelines, containerizing applications, automating deployments, and introducing standard observability and resilience patterns.

The Expert FDE is expected to lead complex engagements, work directly with development and client stakeholders, define the technical remediation approach, implement critical changes personally, and enable client teams to maintain the improved engineering practices.

• - Lead targeted technical engagements addressing security, testing, release, resilience, and legacy technology challenges with development teams.
  
  - Assess application code, dependencies, runtime environment, test coverage, deployment architecture, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and operational risks.
  
  - Write, debug, review, and enhance production-quality code and configuration throughout engagements.
  
  - Define and implement practical modernization and remediation plans with clear priorities, dependencies, risks, and measurable outcomes.
  
  - Develop or improve unit, integration, component, contract, and deployment smoke tests using Test-Driven Development practices.
  
  - Select appropriate automation-testing approaches per application and drive implementation, including the use of AI coding assistance.
  
  - Source suitable test data and implement secure data masking for lower environments.
  
  - Conduct vulnerability triage, root-cause and dependency reachability analyses, remediation prioritization, secure code changes, and regression testing.
  
  - Upgrade Java, JVM, NPM, Spring, open-source libraries, internal dependencies, installed software, base images, and operating systems to supported versions.
  
  - Establish sustainable dependency-management processes with continuous library updates using Renovate or equivalent tools.
  
  - Modernize legacy applications and middleware stacks, including those deployed on Web Sphere or Web Logic.
  
  - Containerize applications using Docker and support deployment to Open Shift.
  
  - Improve source control, branch management, pull-request, and code-review practices.
  
  - Design, implement, and optimize CI/CD pipelines to ensure safe, repeatable, automated, and easy releases.
  
  - Automate database changes using Liquibase or equivalent migration tools.
  
  - Automate installed software and environment changes using Ansible or equivalent configuration management tools.
  
  - Implement secure coding patterns, secrets management, authentication, authorization, and least-privilege controls.
  
  - Introduce standard observability patterns, including structured logging, application metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerting, and actionable health checks.
  
  - Enhance exception handling, operational diagnostics, rollback procedures, and production-validation controls.
  
  - Design or improve resilient deployment architectures, including hot-hot cross-datacenter deployments where required.
  
  - Lead technical workshops and effectively communicate technical decisions, risks, blockers, trade-offs, and progress to engineering, security, architecture, operations, project management, and stakeholders.
  
  - Provide technical leadership through code reviews, coaching, reusable standards, documentation, and knowledge transfer to development teams.
  
  - Take ownership from initial assessment through implementation, production deployment, stabilization, and handover.

The role demands extensive hands-on software engineering experience, with a focus on developing and maintaining production applications. Candidates must actively write and configure code, not merely oversee architecture or management tasks. Expertise in Java and JVM-based development is essential, while strong Type Script skills are valued for Node.js-centric projects. Proficiency with the Spring ecosystem and modernizing Java enterprise applications is required. The candidate should demonstrate recent personal involvement in coding, debugging, and reviewing production code.

Hard skills include practical experience in Test-Driven Development across multiple testing frameworks, with a solid understanding of various testing types such as unit, integration, and regression tests. The role involves creating automated test…