HOS: Technical Architect — Senior / Lead
Summary
The Technical Architect will design and evolve core frameworks and platform components for travel-tech products using Java, Spring Boot, and Kafka. The role involves leading modernization initiatives, mentoring engineering teams, and driving the adoption of cloud-native and AI-assisted development practices.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build, and evolve core frameworks and reusable platform components.
- Perform hands-on coding for technology upgrades and migrations (Java/Spring/Jakarta/Tomcat and related platform components).
- Own and drive large-scale modernization initiatives across services and shared libraries.
- Build and evaluate POCs to assess new technologies, patterns, and platform capabilities.
- Resolve complex technical issues across frameworks, distributed services, and integration layers.
- Ensure implementation alignment with platform and enterprise architecture.
- Define, review, and enforce coding standards, framework usage policies, and technical guidelines.
- Mentor architects, tech leads, and engineers; guide design and code quality decisions.
- Drive adoption of emerging technologies including AI-assisted development, cloud-native tooling, and observability practices.
- Collaborate with architecture, product, and engineering stakeholders for execution and delivery alignment.
Essential Experience Java & Backend
- Strong Java proficiency across mixed runtimes (legacy and modern), with migration ownership toward modern LTS baselines (JDK 11+, preferably JDK 17).
- OOP concepts, SOLID principles, and design patterns.
- Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring MVC, and Spring Security.
- RESTful API design and implementation.
- JPA and Hibernate.
API & Integration
- Strong API governance and specification experience using Swagger/OpenAPI.
- Experience with event-driven architecture and messaging patterns: Kafka producers/consumers, event contracts, serialization formats (JSON, Avro).
- Strong validation and business-rule enforcement patterns in API and service layers.
- Security and authentication implementation including OAuth2, JWT, and API security best practices.
Data & Schema
- Hands-on No-SQL and relational database experience (PostgreSQL preferred; MongoDB/Cassandra exposure is valuable).
- Strong database schema evolution practices using versioning/changelog approaches (Liquibase).
Platform & Delivery
- Strong experience in framework/platform-level development (not only feature-level application coding).
- Proven experience in migration and upgrade programs across core platform components.
- Experience with application container runtimes and deployment packaging patterns (Tomcat, containerized deployments).
- AWS ecosystem exposure (preferred).
- Docker containerization.
- CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and Git-based workflows.
- Kubernetes/EKS and Helm-based deployment patterns (preferred).
Leadership & Practices
- Strong debugging, performance analysis, and production problem-solving capabilities.
- Experience working in Agile development environments.
- Strong communication, cross-team collaboration, and technical leadership capability.
- Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot or similar) for productivity, code quality, and accelerated delivery.
Good to Have
- Front-end ecosystem awareness in JavaScript/TypeScript-based environments.
- Observability tooling and SRE-aligned engineering practices.
Technology Landscape
This role spans two product platforms:
CRS
- Java backend (custom IoC/DI framework, Tomcat WAR deployment, Kafka clients, AWS SDK).
- Jakarta XML Bind, Swagger/OpenAPI, PostgreSQL, JWT/OAuth2 (AWS Cognito).
- Ember.js / TypeScript frontend with Webpack build tooling.
- AWS-native CI/CD (CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CloudFormation, ECR).
Distribution Gateway
- Java 17, Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security.
- Kafka event-driven architecture (producers/consumers, Avro/Glue-Avro serialization, configurable event topics).
- Springdoc/OpenAPI, Swagger UI, RESTful APIs.
- JPA/Hibernate, PostgreSQL, Liquibase-managed schema evolution.
- Quartz/custom scheduler framework and @Scheduled jobs.
- Multi-tenant datasource/filter/security patterns.
- Dockerized builds, Jenkins CI/CD pipelines, AWS ECR, Helm deployment assets.
Skills
- Agile
- AI
- API
- Api Design
- Api Security
- Authentication
- AWS
- Cassandra
- CI/CD
- Cloud
- Cloud Native
- CloudFormation
- Containerization
- Design Patterns
- Docker
- EKS
- Ember.js
- Event Driven Architecture
- Git
- GitHub
- Github Copilot
- Helm
- Hibernate
- Java
- JavaScript
- Jenkins
- JPA
- JSON
- JWT
- Kafka
- Kubernetes
- MongoDB
- MVC
- OAuth
- Observability
- OOP
- OpenAPI
- PostgreSQL
- REST
- Spring
- SQL
- Swagger
- Tomcat
- TypeScript
- Webpack
- XML