JAVA Quarkus Full stack Backend Engineer in Halifax

The Role

The Senior/Lead Full-Stack Cloud Engineer will design, develop and operate secure, scalable and resilient cloud-native applications using Java, Quarkus, React and Google Cloud Platform with 8+ years of experience in designing, developing, and optimizing real-time, low-latency data processing platforms. The ideal candidate should possess strong expertise in Java, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, streaming technologies, and data engineering frameworks to build scalable solutions capable of processing high-volume data changes with minimal latency.

The role requires strong experience in API development, microservices architecture, event-driven systems, containerisation and automated software delivery. The successful candidate will contribute across the complete software-development lifecycle, from solution design and implementation through testing, deployment, observability and production support.

The engineer will work closely with product owners, architects, engineering teams, security specialists, platform teams and other stakeholders to deliver high-quality digital services. The role also requires the consistent application of security-by-design, test automation, DevSecOps and cloud-engineering principles.

The position includes additional responsibility for technical leadership, architectural direction, engineering standards, mentoring and delivery oversight.

Required Experience

• Approximately 8 or more years of professional software-engineering experience.

• Significant experience designing and delivering distributed cloud-native systems.

• Advanced experience with Java, microservices, APIs, event-driven systems and cloud platforms.

• Demonstrable technical leadership across complex deliveries.

• Experience defining engineering standards and reviewing solution designs.

• Experience mentoring engineers and coordinating technical activity across teams.

• Proven ability to manage technical risks, dependencies and architectural trade-offs.

• Experience leading the resolution of critical or complex production issues.

• Ability to communicate technical strategy and solution decisions to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.

Your responsibilities:

Application Engineering

• Design, develop, test and maintain enterprise-grade applications using Java and Quarkus.

• Develop responsive, accessible and reusable user-interface components using React.

• Build reliable and maintainable RESTful APIs and integration services.

• Apply clean-code principles, recognised design patterns and modular software-design practices.

• Produce code that is readable, testable, secure and suitable for long-term maintenance.

• Perform code reviews and provide constructive technical feedback to engineering colleagues.

• Diagnose and resolve complex application, integration and performance issues.

• Maintain appropriate technical documentation, including application designs, API specifications, deployment instructions and operational support information.

API and Microservices Architecture

• Design and implement independently deployable microservices with clearly defined responsibilities and interfaces.

• Develop secure, versioned and well-documented APIs.

• Apply suitable API-management principles, including authentication, authorisation, validation, error handling, rate limiting and backward compatibility.

• Contribute to decisions regarding service boundaries, communication patterns, data ownership and service dependencies.

• Design services for scalability, fault tolerance, maintainability and operational resilience.

• Assess when microservices, modular services, synchronous APIs or asynchronous messaging are the most appropriate architectural patterns.

• Minimise unnecessary coupling between services and support controlled service evolution.

Event-Driven Engineering

• Design and implement event-driven solutions using Google Cloud Pub/Sub.

• Develop message publishers, subscribers and event-processing components.

• Apply reliable event-processing patterns, including retries, idempotency, dead-letter handling and duplicate-message management.

• Design event schemas and support appropriate schema versioning and compatibility.

• Monitor event flows, message latency, delivery failures and processing backlogs.

• Select appropriate synchronous or asynchronous communication patterns based on business and technical requirements.

Google Cloud Engineering

• Build and deploy cloud-native workloads on Google Cloud Platform.

• Develop and operate services using Cloud Run and Google Kubernetes Engine.

• Configure and use Google Cloud Pub/Sub for asynchronous communication.

• Automate application build, test and deployment processes using Cloud Build.

• Apply Identity and Access Management controls based on least-privilege principles.

• Securely manage application secrets and sensitive configuration using Secret Manager.

• Implement appropriate service accounts, roles and access boundaries.

• Support cloud-resource configuration across development, testing, staging and production environments.

• Contribute to the efficient use of cloud resources, including performance optimisation and cost awareness.

Containerisation and Kubernetes

• Package applications and supporting components using Docker.

• Create secure, efficient and maintainable container images.

• Deploy and manage containerised workloads on Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine.

• Configure application resources, health checks, environment settings, secrets and deployment policies.

• Support workload scalability, availability and resilience through appropriate Kubernetes configurations.

• Diagnose container, networking, deployment and runtime issues.

• Apply safe container-management practices, including image scanning, dependency hygiene and minimal base images.

CI/CD and DevSecOps

• Build and maintain automated CI/CD pipelines for application build, test, security validation and deployment.

• Integrate unit tests, integration tests, code-quality checks and security scans into delivery pipelines.

• Automate deployments across multiple environments.

• Support safe release approaches such as rolling deployments, blue-green deployments or canary releases where appropriate.

• Establish repeatable rollback and recovery procedures.

• Reduce manual deployment activities and improve delivery consistency.

• Collaborate with platform and DevOps teams to improve developer experience and engineering productivity.

Security by Design

• Embed security controls throughout the software-development lifecycle.

• Apply secure-coding standards and remediate vulnerabilities identified through code analysis, dependency scanning and security testing.

• Implement appropriate application authentication and authorisation controls.

• Protect sensitive information in transit and at rest.

• Ensure credentials, tokens and configuration secrets are not embedded in source code or deployment artefacts.

• Apply least-privilege access using Google Cloud IAM and service accounts.

• Participate in threat-modelling activities and security-design reviews.

• Support audit, governance and compliance requirements by producing appropriate technical evidence.

Observability and Production Support

• Implement structured application logging and operational audit information.

• Define relevant metrics, dashboards and alerts for production services.

• Support distributed tracing and correlation across APIs, microservices and event-driven components.

• Monitor service availability, latency, error rates, resource consumption and message-processing performance.

• Troubleshoot incidents using logs, metrics, traces and cloud-platform diagnostic tools.

• Participate in production-support and incident-management activities.

• Contribute to root-cause analysis and ensure that corrective and preventive actions are completed.

• Improve system resilience based on operational experience and production feedback.

• Create and maintain operational runbooks and troubleshooting guides.

Testing and Quality Engineering

• Apply test-driven development and behaviour-driven development practices where appropriate.

• Create unit, component, integration, API, contract and end-to-end automated tests.

• Define meaningful acceptance criteria in collaboration with product and quality-engineering colleagues.

• Ensure tests are reliable, maintainable and integrated into CI/CD pipelines.

• Use test automation to identify defects early in the development lifecycle.

• Balance test coverage with risk, maintainability and delivery speed.

• Promote shared responsibility for quality across the engineering team.

Collaboration and Agile Delivery

• Work with product owners, business analysts, architects and engineering colleagues to refine requirements and technical solutions.

• Break complex requirements into manageable engineering tasks.

• Participate actively in sprint planning, refinement, daily coordination, demonstrations and retrospectives.

• Communicate dependencies, technical risks and delivery constraints clearly.

• Provide realistic estimates and contribute to delivery planning.

• Collaborate across teams to resolve integration and platform dependencies.

• Share knowledge through documentation, technical demonstrations and engineering communities.

Additional Level Responsibilities

The successful candidate will also:

• Provide technical leadership for one or more engineering teams or services.

• Translate business and architectural objectives into practical technical designs.

• Lead solution-design discussions and document significant technical decisions.

• Establish and enforce engineering standards for coding, testing, security, observability and deployment.

• Coordinate technical delivery across multiple services or teams.

• Mentor engineers and support technical capability development.

• Identify architectural risks and recommend proportionate remediation plans.

• Review complex designs and changes before implementation or production release.

• Act as an escalation point for high-impact technical and production issues.

• Work with architects and platform leaders to influence engineering strategy and technology adoption.

• Balance immediate delivery requirements with long-term maintainability, security and resilience.

Your Profile

Essential skills/knowledge/experience:

Backend Development

• Java (Java 17+ preferred)

• Quarkus Framework

• RESTful API Development

• Microservices Architecture

• Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)

• Design Patterns

• SOLID Principles

• Secure Coding Practices

Frontend Development

• React

• JavaScript / TypeScript

• HTML5

• CSS3

• Responsive Web Design

• Frontend Component Architecture

• State Management

• API Integration

Cloud Technologies (Google Cloud Platform)

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

• Cloud Run

• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

• Google Pub/Sub

• Cloud Build

• Identity and Access Management (IAM)

• Secret Manager

Event-Driven Architecture

• Event-Driven Design

• Asynchronous Messaging

• Event Streaming

• Pub/Sub Messaging Patterns

• Event Processing

• Idempotency Patterns

• Dead-Letter Queue Handling

Containerization & Orchestration

• Docker

• Kubernetes

• Container Security

• Container Deployment

• Service Discovery

• Auto Scaling

• Kubernetes Workload Management

DevOps & CI/CD

• Continuous Integration (CI)

• Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD)

• Build Automation

• Release Management

• Deployment Pipelines

• DevSecOps

• Git-Based Development

Observability & Monitoring

• Application Logging

• Monitoring & Alerting

• Performance Monitoring

• Distributed Tracing

• Incident Diagnosis

• Production Support

• Operational Metrics

Security Engineering

• Security by Design

• Identity & Access Management

• Secrets Management

• Authentication & Authorization

• Vulnerability Management

• Application Security

• Cloud Security Best Practices

Testing & Quality Engineering

• Test Driven Development (TDD)

• Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)

• Unit Testing

• Integration Testing

• API Testing

• Automation Frameworks

• Continuous Testing

Desirable skills/knowledge/experience:

• Cloud Devops Skills

• Application Monitoring