Ref: #66878
Senior Java Engineer with EMR Spark
Job Title: Senior Full Stack Engineer (Backend-leaning) with EMR Spark
Location: Hybrid – Chicago, IL (3 days onsite/week)
Type: 6-12 month contract
About the Role
We’re seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer with a strong backend focus to join our growing engineering team. In this role, you'll design and build scalable payment systems that power critical transaction processing, fraud detection, reconciliation, and reporting for a leading financial services platform.
You will work in a hybrid cloud-native environment utilizing Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kafka, AWS, Amazon EMR, Apache Spark, React, and TypeScript to deliver high-impact solutions across our platform. The ideal candidate is an experienced engineer with deep domain expertise in payment systems and financial technologies, and a passion for solving complex data-driven problems at scale.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain backend microservices using Java, Kotlin, and Spring Boot
- Build and manage data-intensive applications using Kafka, Amazon EMR, and Apache Spark
- Collaborate with front-end developers to integrate UI components built with React and TypeScript
- Architect and implement scalable payment workflows, including fraud detection, transaction processing, reconciliation, and reporting
- Optimize performance and reliability across distributed systems and streaming data pipelines
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product, data, and DevOps teams to ensure system integrity and seamless deployments
- Implement and uphold secure coding practices and compliance standards relevant to financial software
- Participate in code reviews, technical design discussions, and mentor junior engineers
Qualifications
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a backend emphasis
- Strong proficiency in Java, Spring Boot, and Kotlin
- Proven experience with Kafka, microservices architecture, and AWS
- Hands-on experience with Amazon EMR and Apache Spark for large-scale data processing
- Solid understanding of payment systems, including fraud detection, transaction management, processing, reconciliation, reporting, and workflow design
- Frontend development experience using React and TypeScript
- Background working at a financial institution, ideally a credit card provider
- Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience designing systems compliant with PCI DSS and other financial security standards
- Knowledge of real-time analytics or machine learning integrations for fraud detection
- Familiarity with observability tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or ELK stack
- Prior experience in high-throughput, low-latency systems for financial applications