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ZipStaff Inc.

Sr System Engineer - Technical Lead

Washington, District of Columbia•Contract
$38 - $40 hourly
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About the Job
Job Title: Sr System Engineer - Technical Lead
Location: Washington, DC (Primarily remote; in-person PI Planning required)
Employment Type: W2 Contract
Duration: 11 months
About the Opportunity:
ZipStaff 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.
What You'll Do:
  • 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 NoSQL data models and resolve database performance issues.
  • Build containerized apps on AWS (Lambda, S3, EC2, API Gateway, SQS/SNS) with IaC and DevSecOps CI/CD.
  • Implement distributed tracing, metrics, logging, secrets management and API security (OAuth2, JWT).
  • Lead code reviews, troubleshoot complex defects and mentor engineers.
Required Qualifications:
  • 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/NoSQL tuning, complex SQL and AWS core services.
Nice to Have:
  • Docker, Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift.
  • Splunk, Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch or OpenTelemetry.
  • Exposure to Angular front-end integration.
Benefits:
  • Health Insurance.
  • Dental Insurance.
  • Vision Insurance.
  • 401(k) + 401(k) matching.
  • Paid time off.
  • Referral Program.
About ZipStaff:
ZipStaff connects skilled technology professionals with leading organizations across the United States, matching top talent with impactful contract and full-time opportunities.
To apply, submit your resume through this posting. Qualified candidates will be contacted by a ZipStaff recruiter.
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