Java Backend Engineer

Aquent has partnered with a premier global leader in digital audio and music streaming to find a talented engineer who will help keep the systems powering personalized audio experiences running flawlessly. Our client connects hundreds of millions of music, podcast, and audiobook fans worldwide with the content they love. By joining forces with Aquent, you will gain access to exceptional opportunities with industry-shaping brands, ensuring your career continues to grow while making a massive impact on global digital experiences.

The Opportunity

We are seeking a skilled backend engineer to join a dedicated team focused on the reliability, maintenance, and optimization of the backend services that power next-generation personalized listening experiences. In this role, you will have a direct impact on the stability of a massive ecosystem of high-volume services. You will ensure that millions of listeners enjoy seamless, uninterrupted audio by keeping systems updated, reducing alert noise, and optimizing infrastructure. This is a fantastic opportunity to work with cutting-edge cloud technologies and play a vital role in maintaining the backbone of a world-class streaming platform.

What You'll Do

• Monitor and maintain high-volume backend services, responding to and triaging system alerts to ensure high availability.
• Perform routine dependency updates, security patches, and infrastructure upgrades, including Kubernetes version bumps and cloud migrations.
• Improve system observability and reduce alert fatigue by tuning thresholds, setting up alert grouping, and refining monitoring configurations.
• Identify legacy or unused services and safely decommission them using developer portal tooling.
• Write, update, and maintain comprehensive runbooks and service documentation to streamline future operations.
• Keep the service catalog accurate, ensuring correct component ownership, reliability tiers, and routing paths.
• Collaborate closely with engineering squads and managers through handovers, operational reviews, and knowledge sharing.
• Proactively identify opportunities to reduce technical debt and simplify backend complexity.

What You'll Bring

• Proven experience operating and deploying distributed, high-volume backend services in a production environment.
• Strong hands-on experience with Java backend development.
• Comfort with triaging incidents on complex systems using runbooks, dashboards, and logs.
• Experience with monitoring and alerting tools such as PagerDuty, Grafana, and Prometheus/PromQL.
• Excellent technical writing skills with a passion for creating clear documentation and leaving systems better than you found them.
• Comfort using modern AI-assisted coding tools to accelerate maintenance and migration tasks.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with distributed, asynchronous teams.

Preferred Skills

• Experience working with Kubernetes for container orchestration.
• Experience with cloud platforms, particularly Google Cloud Platform (GCP).