Cloud Engineer; GCP at Openkyber Illinois

Lead Backend Engineer Notification Hub (Onsite):

Location:

Onsite (Springfield, MO / Dallas, TX)

Role Type: C2C or W2

Note: Need only very senior resource who has stronger Coding skills. Preferred work location
- Springfield, MO

Our Client is modernizing its customer messaging ecosystem through a centralized Notification Hub built on Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud Platform). The Lead Backend Engineer will drive the architecture and development of this platform, overseeing GKE-based microservices, Pub/Sub event workflows, Avro schema governance, secure webhook processing, vendor integrations, and preference synchronization. This role sets the technical direction and ensures platform scalability, resilience, and extensibility.

• Lead design and development of Notification Hub services:
  Notification Router, Webhook Receiver, Preference Sync, and related components.
• Architect and maintain event-driven pipelines using Google Pub/Sub with concurrency, retry/DLQ, idempotency, and back pressure handling.
• Define and govern Avro schemas for all event types (order, cart, preference, profile).
• Develop and evolve the vendor-agnostic adapter layer for messaging providers (Listrak today; Iterable/Braze/etc. future).
• Oversee secure webhook ingestion through Apigee GKE with HMAC validation and rate limiting.
• Enforce zero-trust security using IAM, Workload Identity, and least-privilege access.
• Drive platform-level observability: logs, metrics, distributed tracing, and event audits.
• Collaborate with Digital, Loyalty, CRM, MDM, Architecture, and Infrastructure teams.
• Provide technical leadership to offshore Senior Developers, Developers, and QA/Automation.
• Participate in architecture reviews, capacity planning (4M+ monthly events), and production operations.

• 10+ years backend engineering; 5+ years implementing event-driven architectures.
• Strong expertise in Java, Spring Boot, microservices, and distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with GKE/Kubernetes, Pub/Sub or Kafka, and cloud-native design.
• Experience with Avro, Protobuf, or schema-based payload governance.
• Strong integration experience with external APIs (Mar Tech, CRM, MDM, or messaging systems).
• Understanding of IAM, secure webhook handling, and zero-trust principles.
• Experience implementing observability frameworks across microservices.

• Experience building or operating large-scale notification, messaging, or orchestration platforms.
• Exposure to ESPs (Listrak, Braze, Iterable, SFMC, Adobe Campaign).
• Experience with hybrid on-prem cloud event ingestion models.