Backend / Platform Developer (Temporal & Kubernetes)

Role overview

Backend / Platform Developer Consultant focused on building and operating enterprise-grade distributed platforms. You’ll own both application code and the infrastructure it runs on, helping transform technology delivery for clients.

Responsibilities

• Build and run enterprise-level backend and platform systems end-to-end (code + infrastructure)
• Design and implement durable workflow orchestration using Temporal (model workflows/activities, retries/timeouts, idempotency, failure modes)
• Architect and operate Kafka-based event streaming systems (topics/partitions, consumer groups, schema management, ordering and delivery guarantees, consumer lag)
• Design and build GraphQL APIs (schema/resolvers, performance considerations such as N+1, caching, pagination; federation is a plus)
• Architect, deploy, and operate production systems on AWS, including EKS and related networking/IAM/messaging/data services
• Deploy, operate, and debug production workloads on Kubernetes
• Apply systems engineering principles to scaling, concurrency, backpressure, caching, and failure mode reasoning
• Plan and execute migrations with minimal downtime (replatforming, workflow engine migrations, data/schema migrations, environment migrations)
• Implement and improve CI/CD and GitOps-style delivery
• Work with observability tooling in practice (logging, metrics, tracing; OpenTelemetry a plus)
• Contribute to database schema design and development

Requirements

• Strong working knowledge of Java and the JVM ecosystem (Spring Boot or similar)
• Comfort owning both code and infrastructure
• Hands-on experience with a durable workflow/execution engine—Temporal preferred (Airflow/Prefect acceptable)
• Experience designing/operating Kafka event streaming systems (topic/partitioning, consumer groups, schema management, guarantees, consumer lag)
• Kubernetes experience deploying and operating production workloads
• Deep, hands-on AWS experience (architecting/deploying/operating production systems)
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines and GitOps-style delivery
• Systems engineering mindset for distributed systems issues (scaling, concurrency, backpressure, failure modes)
• Experience planning and executing migrations
• Observability experience (logging/metrics/tracing; OpenTelemetry a plus)
• Database schema design/development expertise

Nice-to-haves

• Additional backend languages: Go, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, C# (or similar)
• Deep Temporal production expertise: self-hosted on Kubernetes or Temporal Cloud, workflow versioning/patching, safe deployments, long-running workflow migrations
• Temporal worker deployment/tuning (pollers, task queues, concurrency)
• mTLS/namespace management using SPIFFE/SPIRE or private CA
• Platform/DevOps depth: building or operating an internal developer platform (IDP)
• GitOps with ArgoCD (or Flux) and low/zero manual-apply delivery
• Kafka & event streaming depth: Kafka Connect/Streams/schema registry workflows (Avro/Protobuf), integrating Kafka with downstream analytical stores
• Exposure to Lambda vs Kappa architectures for large dataset processing
• Observability with OpenTelemetry

Location / work authorization

• Must be located in the United States and authorized to work in the US