Sr System Engineer - Technical Lead

Job Title: Sr System Engineer
- Technical Lead

Location: Washington, DC (Primarily remote; in-person PI Planning required)

Employment Type: W2 Contract

Duration: 11 months

Zip Staff is hiring a Sr System Engineer
- Technical Lead (Java / Distributed Systems) for our client, a major U.S. passenger rail transportation organization based in Washington, DC. As a hands‑on coding leader, you will architect reusable frameworks, rules‑driven engines, event‑driven pipelines and shared libraries powering business‑critical services, using Java, Spring Boot, Kafka and AWS. The role is primarily remote, with mandatory in‑person SAFe PI Planning and occasional milestone visits to offices in Washington, DC, Wilmington, DE or Philadelphia, PA.

• Lead design, implementation and deployment of resilient, high-throughput microservices and shared components in Java and Spring Boot.
• Build configuration‑driven rules engines, common SDKs and shared libraries to standardize delivery.
• Develop Kafka producers, consumers and messaging pipelines with retries, circuit breakers and dead‑letter queues.
• Design scalable relational and No
  
  SQL data models and resolve database performance issues.
• Build containerized apps on AWS (Lambda, S3, EC2, API Gateway, SQS/SNS) with IaC and Dev Sec Ops  CI/CD.
• Implement distributed tracing, metrics, logging, secrets management and API security (OAuth2, JWT).
• Lead code reviews, troubleshoot complex defects and mentor engineers.

• Bachelor's in CS, IT or Engineering (or equivalent) and 10+ years of software engineering, including 8+ years of Java.
• 5+ years building enterprise microservices with Java, Spring Boot and the Spring ecosystem.
• 3+ years as a hands‑on Senior Technical Lead, Lead or Principal Engineer.
• Expertise with Apache Kafka, event‑driven architecture, DDD and fault‑tolerant integration patterns.
• Strong relational/No
  
  SQL tuning, complex SQL and AWS core services.

• Docker, Kubernetes or Red Hat Open Shift.
• Splunk, Datadog, Grafana, Cloud Watch or Open Telemetry.
• Exposure to Angular front‑end integration.

• Health Insurance.
• Dental Insurance.
• Vision Insurance.
• 401(k) + 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off.
• Referral Program.

Zip Staff connects skilled technology professionals with leading organizations across the United States, matching top talent with impactful contract and full‑time opportunities.