SOLUTION ARCHITECT L1

1) Java 8+; Java 17/21

• Java 8+ (8/11/17/21), including functional programming; strong hands-on skills
• Excellent working experience in Spring Boot
• Strong understanding of REST API design and implementation, exception handling, validation, and logging
• Clean coding practices and design principles

2) Spring Ecosystem (MVC, Boot, Cloud, Security, AI)

• Hands-on experience developing applications using Spring/Spring MVC/Spring Boot
• Spring Boot with REST APIs, WebFlux, ORM; plus optional frameworks such as Batch, Integration, and GraphQL
• Working knowledge of Spring Cloud: Config Server, Gateway, Service Discovery, and Circuit Breaker patterns
• Security: Spring Security, OAuth2/JWT, and API security best practices
• Working knowledge of API versioning and API documentation using Swagger/OpenAPI

3) Coding & Problem Solving

• Validate strong hands-on coding ownership, with emphasis on design-oriented problem solving, refactoring, and maintaining code quality at scale
• Programs are expected to cover data structures, collections, concurrency, and demonstrate design discipline, extensibility, and testability
• Candidates should be able to identify code smells, refactor toward cleaner abstractions, and explain trade-offs made during implementation
• Demonstrate ability to write or reason about unit tests and testability, showing a quality-first mindset expected from a technical lead role

4) Microservices, Distributed Systems & Messaging (Kafka / RabbitMQ / MQ)

• Strong hands-on microservices development, including service boundaries, communication, failure handling, and consistency challenges
• Design and implement idempotent APIs to support retries and distributed system reliability
• Patterns: Saga, event-driven architecture, resilience patterns, and anti-pattern awareness
• Understanding of API gateway concepts

5) Kafka / Event-Driven Systems

• Messaging: Kafka/RabbitMQ/MQ
• Hands-on producer and consumer implementation
• Good understanding of topics, partitions, consumer groups, message ordering, and partitioning strategy
• Experience with error handling, including retries and DLQ
• Handling duplicate events and idempotency awareness

6) Cloud, CI/CD & Deployment

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD tooling such as Harness and Jenkins
• Understanding of deployment pipelines across multiple environments (Dev, SIT, Prod)
• Containerized applications using Docker
• Kubernetes-based deployments
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or equivalent IaC tools

7) Exposure to Cloud Platforms (GCP Preferred)

• If not GCP, AWS/Azure experience is acceptable with willingness to learn GCP

8) Development Practices

• Experience working in Agile/Scrum teams
• Hands-on experience with code quality tools such as SonarQube or equivalent
• Hands-on experience with unit testing tools such as JUnit and Mockito
• Familiarity with logging/monitoring tools such as Splunk, Datadog, or similar tools

Key Responsibilities

• Responsibilities mapped to 8 evaluation categories, with a lead-level focus
• B3/C1 responsibilities highlight technical leadership, design ownership, mentoring, and delivery accountability, while still remaining hands-on
• Lead the design and implementation of modules or services within enterprise and microservices-based applications
• Translate functional and non-functional requirements into technical designs, working closely with architects and product stakeholders
• Drive end-to-end delivery for assigned modules/services, including backend services, APIs, and frontend integration
• Design and implement microservices patterns such as idempotent APIs, Saga, event-driven workflows, and resilience strategies
• Review and guide the implementation of Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and security features, ensuring correct usage and consistency
• Participate in defining API contracts, versioning approach, and documentation (Swagger/OpenAPI) for services owned by the team
• Identify and address performance, scalability, and reliability concerns at the service or module level
• Actively contribute to code reviews, design reviews, and refactoring initiatives, improving overall codebase quality
• Mentor and guide B2 developers, providing technical direction, feedback, and hands-on support
• Own and resolve complex production issues, including concurrency, performance bottlenecks, and integration failures
• Ensure testing coverage and quality, including unit, integration, and participation in contract testing as part of CI/CD pipelines
• Work with DevOps and platform teams on CI/CD improvements, container deployments, and environment readiness
• Participate in estimation, story point assessment, sprint planning, and delivery tracking
• Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams (QA, DevOps, Product) and support communication with customer-side technical teams
• Promote engineering best practices, secure coding standards, and responsible usage of tools, including AI/GenAI for productivity

Section IV – Job Qualifications & Skills

Domain

• Banking/Payments domain experience is good to have

Soft Skills

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts, design decisions, and coding approaches during interviews and discussions
• Team collaboration
• Documentation and knowledge sharing