Senior Java Backend Engineer

Aquent is partnering with a global leader in audio streaming and digital media to find a talented engineering professional who will help shape the future of how millions of people discover and enjoy audio content. This innovative company connects listeners worldwide with personalized music, podcasts, and audiobooks, creating experiences that keep the world listening. By joining this team, you will play a pivotal role in stabilizing and optimizing the core systems that power world-class interactive experiences, ensuring seamless delivery to hundreds of millions of active users and making a massive scale impact from day one.

The Opportunity and Impact

We are looking for an experienced backend specialist to take ownership of the critical systems powering generative and interactive listening experiences. In this role, you will be the guardian of reliability, ensuring that hundreds of backend services run flawlessly so that product squads can focus on pioneering next-generation features. Your work will directly impact the daily listening habits of hundreds of millions of users globally. If you enjoy solving complex distributed systems challenges, reducing technical debt, and leaving codebases better than you found them, this is the perfect opportunity to make a massive scale impact.

What You Will Do

• Own the operation, maintenance, and reliability of high-volume backend services, responding to and triaging production alerts.
• Keep services up-to-date by managing dependency updates, security patches, and infrastructure upgrades, including container orchestration migrations and cloud platform transitions.
• Proactively reduce alert noise by tuning thresholds, setting up alert grouping, and optimizing monitoring configurations.
• Identify underutilized services and safely decommission them using developer portal tooling.
• Author and maintain comprehensive runbooks, service documentation, and accurate service catalogs to ensure operational excellence.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional engineering teams and managers through handovers, operational reviews, and technical alignment meetings.
• Drive technical execution, architect systems, design solutions, and proactively reduce technical debt and complexity.
• Track progress, escalate potential blockers, and help steer the technical roadmap for system execution.

What You Bring (Must-Have Qualifications)

• Deep expertise in senior-level Java backend development.
• Proven experience operating, scaling, and maintaining high-volume, distributed production systems.
• Comfort triaging incidents on unfamiliar systems using runbooks, dashboards, and logs.
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and alerting tools such as PagerDuty, Grafana, and Prometheus.
• Strong track record of scaling systems, removing technical debt, and writing clear, high-quality documentation.
• Familiarity with using AI-assisted coding tools to accelerate maintenance and migration tasks.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across distributed, asynchronous teams.
• Strong prioritization skills and the ability to drive alignment across multiple technical teams.

Bonus Points (Nice-to-Have Qualifications)

• Experience with Kubernetes and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Proficiency in Python.
• Prior experience maintaining ultra-high-volume systems serving hundreds of millions of users.
• Experience working in fast-paced environments or previous experience as a contractor.