Java Software Engineer (Contractor)

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end lifecycle of brand-new Java microservices that will power Protolabs’ global logistics engine. From discovery and design through deployment, monitoring, and iterative improvement, you will ship thin, high-impact slices that immediately cut manual work, boost on-time shipments, and give operations teams real-time visibility.
• • Architect and code resilient Spring Boot services that expose secure, versioned REST and async APIs. You will define data contracts, choose integration patterns, and make pragmatic trade-offs that let us move fast today while laying foundations that can scale to millions of orders tomorrow.
• • Integrate tightly with an event-driven backbone (RabbitMQ, KNative) to orchestrate order allocation, production hand-offs, quality checkpoints, shipping, and payment flows. You’ll retire brittle scripts and legacy tools, replacing them with automated exception handling and reconciliation jobs that run 24/7.
• • Establish production-grade tooling from day one: CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions, containerized deployments on Kubernetes, automated test suites, structured logging, metrics, and SLO-based alerting. You will treat observability as a feature, not an afterthought.
• • Collaborate daily with Product Operations, logistics analysts, and front-end engineers. You will translate complex business rules into clean code, run blameless post-mortems, and contribute to our Backend Guild to raise the bar for Java excellence across the company.
• • Champion continuous improvement. Whether it’s shaving minutes off cycle time, reducing cloud cost per shipment, or mentoring peers on Spring best practices, you will measure impact, share learnings, and celebrate wins with a humble, can-do attitude.