Lead Java Developer

Kitestring is a 20+-million-dollar company with 100+ associates and growing. We are a 25 year old start up in Northwest Arkansas. We provide technical expertise to various clients delivering innovations that improve how customers shop and the enterprise operates. At Kitestring Technical Services, our mission is to share our collective knowledge to positively impact our employees, clients, and communities. Our vision is to be the most trusted partner in technology consulting. We believe people enable technology and vice-versa which is why we are in the business of both. We persistently challenge the barriers to diversity, inclusion, and empathetic cooperation. 

Our Core Values are Transparency, People Driven, Empowered, Quality focused and socially responsible. Our values direct our

About the role
My client—a national convenience & fuel retailer—is modernizing their point-of-sale (POS) platform. We’re looking for a Lead Java Developer to drive design and delivery of cloud-native, event-driven services that power store operations. 

What you’ll do

• Own delivery end-to-end: translate high-level requirements into technical designs and working software across the full SDLC.
• Lead a small squad: guide 2–3 engineers plus a project manager; break down epics into stories, plan sprints, and assign work.
• Architect microservices: design resilient, scalable Spring Boot services and APIs for POS, pricing, promotions, loyalty, and payments integrations.
• Event-driven pipelines: build and operate Kafka (or similar) topics, consumer groups, DLQs, retry/compensation logic, and retention policies.
• Cloud-first buildout: design for reliability, performance, and cost on any major cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure); leverage managed services appropriately.
• Kubernetes delivery: containerize services, define deployment/config best practices, and tune resource requests/limits and autoscaling.
• Data modeling & performance: design for distributed data; optimize schemas and queries across relational and non-relational datastores.
• Quality & operations: enforce code quality, testing strategies, and CI/CD; instrument with logs/metrics/traces; drive root-cause analysis.
• Cross-functional collaboration: work with product, security, payments, and store ops; partner with offshore teams to deliver at pace.
• Standards & compliance: adhere to PCI and internal controls; document architecture, runbooks, and test strategies.

What you’ll bring

• 8+ years professional software development with 3+ years technical leadership (mentoring, design reviews, backlog ownership).
• Strong Java 11+ and Spring Boot expertise building distributed systems and RESTful services (gRPC a plus).
• Kafka (or compatible) experience: retention strategies, failure handling, DLQs, idempotency, and delivery semantics.
• Cloud experience on at least one major provider (AWS/GCP/Azure), with comfort evaluating managed services and tradeoffs.
• Kubernetes & Docker: deploy, configure, and operate microservices; familiarity with Helm/Kustomize and best practices.
• Datastores: deep SQL skills and performance tuning on relational databases (e.g., Postgres/SQL Server/MySQL) and hands-on with non-relational databases (e.g., document or column-oriented stores).
• Testing & CI/CD: JUnit/Testcontainers, contract testing; pipelines using GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps/Jenkins/GitLab, feature flags, blue/green or canary.
• Observability & resilience: tracing/metrics/logging (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana/cloud-native), circuit breakers, retries, backoff.
• Security-first mindset: OAuth2/OIDC, secrets management, least privilege, and PCI considerations for payments flows.
• Retail/POS domain experience strongly preferred (payments/EMV, offline-first sync, store/edge deployments).

Nice to have

• Experience leading large store rollouts or multi-region deployments.
• Familiarity with message reprocessing strategies and outbox/inbox patterns.
• Exposure to DDD/event sourcing and API gateways (rate limiting, zero-downtime migrations).
• Performance tuning under store-level constraints (limited bandwidth, intermittent connectivity).

What you’ll impact

• A modern, reliable POS backbone for thousands of daily transactions
• Reduced store downtime and faster feature delivery
• Clear engineering standards and a high-performing delivery culture

This is a full-time, onsite-only role, and the client does not offer sponsorship.