Lead Java Engineer

Work Schedule

Environmental Conditions

Job Description

As part of the Thermo Fisher Scientific team, you’ll discover meaningful work that makes a positive impact on a global scale. Join our colleagues in bringing our Mission to life every single day to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. We provide our global teams with the resources needed to achieve individual career goals while helping to take science a step beyond by developing solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges, like protecting the environment, making sure our food is safe or helping find cures for cancer.

DESCRIPTION:
Join Thermo Fisher Scientific, the world leader in serving science, as a Staff Engineer, Software to make a meaningful impact. In this role, you will provide technical leadership and architectural guidance while developing innovative software solutions that enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer. Working in a supportive, multi-functional environment, you will design and implement sophisticated solutions across our product portfolio, from cloud platforms to scientific instrumentation. You will support the growth of other engineers, drive adoption of best practices, and help shape the technical direction of critical projects. This position offers the opportunity to work with advanced technologies while contributing to groundbreaking scientific discoveries.

Role Overview

We are looking for a highly experienced Lead Java Engineer with 12–15 years of software development experience and strong expertise in designing and developing scalable, secure, and high-performance backend systems.

The ideal candidate should have deep hands-on experience with Java, Spring Boot, REST API development, database design, and backend integration. The candidate will be responsible for designing robust backend solutions, developing enterprise-grade services, integrating with internal and external systems, and providing technical leadership to engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend applications and services using Java and Spring Boot.
• Define and drive backend design principles, coding standards, and engineering best practices.
• Design and develop secure, reliable, and well-structured RESTful APIs.
• Define API contracts, request/response models, error-handling mechanisms, and versioning strategies.
• Design efficient and scalable relational and/or NoSQL database models.
• Develop and optimize database queries, indexing strategies, and data-access layers.
• Integrate backend applications with databases, third-party services, enterprise platforms, and external systems.
• Design and implement backend integration patterns for reliable data exchange across systems.
• Develop reusable backend components, libraries, and common services.
• Ensure backend systems meet requirements for performance, scalability, availability, security, and maintainability.
• Identify and resolve complex application, API, database, and integration-related issues.
• Conduct code reviews and ensure adherence to software engineering and secure coding standards.
• Collaborate with frontend developers, technical leads, product owners, QA engineers, DevOps teams, and other stakeholders.
• Participate in technical design discussions, solution reviews, estimation, and implementation planning.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to backend developers.
• Drive improvements in automated testing, build processes, CI/CD, deployment, and observability practices.

Required Technical Skills

• 12–15 years of overall software development experience, with significant experience in backend application development.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Java and object-oriented programming.
• Strong experience with Spring Boot and the broader Spring ecosystem.
• Strong experience in designing and developing RESTful APIs and backend services.
• Good understanding of API design principles, HTTP standards, authentication, authorization, and error handling.
• Strong experience in database design, data modeling, normalization, and performance optimization.
• Experience with relational databases such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, or equivalent technologies.
• Strong proficiency in SQL and database query optimization.
• Experience with ORM and persistence frameworks such as Spring Data JPA, Hibernate, or equivalent technologies.
• Strong understanding of backend integration patterns and enterprise application integration.
• Experience integrating applications with internal and external services through REST APIs, messaging, or other integration mechanisms.
• Good understanding of concurrency, multithreading, asynchronous processing, and transaction management.
• Experience developing modular, reusable, and maintainable backend components.
• Strong understanding of application security and secure API development.
• Familiarity with unit testing, integration testing, and automated testing frameworks.
• Experience with source control systems such as Git.
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and modern software development practices.

Preferred Skills

• Experience working on large-scale enterprise applications and distributed systems.
• Experience with microservices-based applications.
• Knowledge of messaging technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, JMS, or equivalent solutions.
• Experience with caching technologies such as Redis or similar platforms.
• Experience with API documentation tools such as OpenAPI/Swagger.
• Knowledge of containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Understanding of logging, monitoring, tracing, and observability practices.
• Experience with automated testing frameworks such as JUnit, Mockito, or equivalent technologies.
• Exposure to event-driven systems and asynchronous integration patterns.
• Experience with Agile/Scrum software development environments.

Behavioral Competencies

• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills.
• Ability to translate business and system requirements into robust backend solutions.
• Strong ownership and accountability for technical deliverables.
• Ability to lead technical discussions and influence solution decisions.
• Ability to work independently as well as collaboratively within cross-functional teams.
• Strong mentoring and coaching capabilities.
• Ability to troubleshoot complex backend, database, and integration issues.
• Strong focus on software quality, reliability, and engineering excellence.

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.