Lead Software Engineer

Overview
About Business Unit:
The Product team forms the crux of our powerful platforms and helps connect millions of customers worldwide with the brands that matter most to them. This team of innovative problem solvers develops and builds products that position Epsilon as a differentiator, encouraging an open and balanced marketplace built on respect for individuals, where every brand interaction holds value. Our full-cycle product engineering and data teams chart the future and set new benchmarks for our products, by using industry standard methodologies and sophisticated capabilities in data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Driven by a passion for delivering smart end-to-end solutions, this team plays a key role in Epsilon's success story.

We are looking for a highly skilled
Lead Software Engineer with strong expertise in
Java,
real-time streaming systems (Kafka),
distributed databases, and
AWS cloud technologies. The ideal candidate will also have exposure to
large-scale data pipelines and experience working with NoSQL technologies such as
HBase or
Aerospike (nice-to-have).

In this role, you will provide technical leadership, design scalable architectures, mentor engineers, and drive high-quality delivery across critical data and streaming platforms.

Click here to view how Epsilon transforms marketing with 1 View, 1 Vision and 1 Voice.

Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Lead the design and development of scalable, resilient, and high-performance backend services using Java/Spring Boot.
• Architect real-time streaming solutions based on
  Apache Kafka, including producers, consumers, stream processing, and event-driven microservices.
• Ensure strong data modeling and optimal usage of relational and NoSQL databases.
• Drive engineering standards: code quality, design reviews, CI/CD, observability, and performance optimization.

Backend & Streaming System Development

• Build microservices and distributed systems with strong APIs (REST or gRPC).
• Implement event-driven architectures, streaming ETL, and stateful stream processing.
• Design and maintain Kafka infrastructure (topics, partitions, schemas, offset management).
• Ensure data consistency, idempotency, and scalability across services.

Data Engineering & Storage

• Collaborate with data engineering teams to design and optimize pipelines.
• Work with large datasets using relational & NoSQL stores (MySQL, Postgres, DynamoDB, HBase, Aerospike, etc.).
• Integrate data pipelines with backend services, ensuring high throughput and reliability.

Cloud & DevOps

• Build and deploy services on AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, RDS).
• Implement observability using tools like CloudWatch, Prometheus, ELK, Grafana.
• Work with Docker/Kubernetes for containerization and orchestration.
• Optimize infrastructure cost, performance, resilience, and scalability.

Team Leadership & Collaboration

• Mentor and guide engineers in architecture, design patterns, and scalable system design.
• Facilitate technical discussions, backlog grooming, sprint planning, and cross-team coordination.
• Work closely with Product, Data, and DevOps teams to translate requirements into system designs.

Take end-to-end ownership from design development deployment monitoring.

Qualifications
Core Skills

• 8-12+ years of hands-on backend engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in
  Java (Collections, Concurrency, Streams, Spring Boot).
• Deep experience with
  Apache Kafka (core, Streams, Connect).
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and streaming guarantees.
• Experience with
  AWS cloud services (EC2, ECS/EKS, S3, Lambda, CloudWatch, RDS).
• Solid experience in
  SQL and relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL).
• Familiarity with
  microservices design, API guidelines, and system decomposition.
• Experience in performance tuning, memory optimization, and high-throughput system design.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience with
  HBase,
  Aerospike, or similar NoSQL key-value/columnar stores.
• Exposure to
  Spark, Flink, or streaming ETL frameworks.
• Knowledge of
  Terraform or IaC tools.
• Experience with
  monitoring and alerting systems.

Additional Information
Our pillars aren't just words. They're how we show up every day.

• People centricity: We focus on employee well-being in an environment where colleagues truly care about each other.
• Collaboration: We work together, support one another and collectively achieve goals.
• Growth: There are endless opportunities for growth through learning, development and career advancement.
• Innovation: We drive progress through cutting-edge solutions and
  forward-thinking approaches.
• Flexibility: We've created a balance between work and personal life, and we encourage adaptability to solve problems creatively.

Our values guide us to create value for our clients, our people and consumers.

• Act with integrity
• Work together to win together
• Innovate with purpose
• Respect all voices
• Empower with accountability

These pillars and values are our foundation-shaping our culture, guiding our decisions and uniting us in common purpose.