Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.
Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.
As a Senior Java Engineer, you will play a critical role across the full software lifecycle—from design and development through production support and optimization. You will build and evolve modern RESTful services while also maintaining and improving legacy services when required. This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys solving complex problems, optimizing performance and uptime, and tracing issues end-to-end to determine root cause.
You will work in a hybrid Agile environment, collaborating closely with other engineers, architects, and business partners to deliver reliable, scalable systems that run in production.
What You Will Do
- Design, build, and maintain RESTful APIs and back-end services using Java and Spring
- Document and demonstrate solutions by developing documentation, code comments, clear and efficient code.
- Lead development efforts for key modules and features, including hands-on coding
- Maintain and enhance legacy services while incrementally modernizing systems
- Optimize application performance, scalability, and availability in production environments
- Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues by debugging across front-end, service, and database layers
- Participate in and lead code reviews, enforcing engineering best practices and coding standards
- Contribute to architectural decisions, design reviews, and technical direction
- Support production systems, including incident triage, root-cause analysis, and long-term fixes
- Mentor and provide technical guidance to less experienced engineers
What You Will Bring
- 5+ years of back-end engineering experience with Java, including advanced knowledge of core Java, concurrency, JVM performance, and memory management
- Strong experience with the Spring ecosystem, especially Spring Boot, Spring Batch, and Spring MVC / REST
- Proven experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs, including versioning, security, and backward compatibility
- Experience working with legacy Java services (monoliths, batch jobs, or older frameworks) and modernizing them safely
- Document and demonstrate solutions by developing documentation, code comments, clear and efficient code.
- Solid understanding of cloud-native development concepts (stateless services, configuration management, resilience)
- Strong SQL skills, with experience in Oracle and PL/SQL or similar relational databases; advanced SQL is a plus
- Demonstrated ability to debug complex production issues using logging, tracing, and monitoring tools
- Experience with Git, Maven, and CI/CD tools such as Jenkins/Hudson
- Experience reviewing code and providing technical leadership or mentorship
- Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent professional experience
What Will Set You Apart
- Experience with AWS (e.g., EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, IAM)
- Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Familiarity with observability and performance tools (distributed tracing, metrics, APM tools such as Datadog, New Relic, or OpenTelemetry)
- Experience with messaging and integration technologies (Kafka, JMS, SQS, REST integrations)
- Knowledge of security best practices for APIs (OAuth2, JWT, TLS, secrets management)
- Exposure to modern front-end technologies such as JavaScript, React, Angular, or similar frameworks
- Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with business and technical stakeholders
- Strong analytical mindset with a focus on reliability, scalability, and long-term maintainability
This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications of the job. The employer has the right to revise this job description at any time. You will be evaluated in part based on your performance of the responsibilities and/or tasks listed in this job description. You may be required perform other duties that are not included on this job description. The job description is not a contract for employment, and either you or the employer may terminate employment at any time, for any reason, as per terms and conditions of your employment contract.
We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.
