TECHNICAL LEAD - Java

Happiest Minds Technologies
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Java Tech Lead ? Back-End & Agentic AI

We are seeking an experienced Java Tech Lead to join a cross-functional product team responsible for a customer-facing platform. You will lead the design and delivery of scalable, highly available back-end services while helping the team build secure, production-ready agentic AI capabilities.

This role requires strong technical leadership, hands-on Java expertise, solid architectural judgment, and close collaboration with Product, Front-End, Data/AI, Security, and SRE teams. You will guide engineering standards and technical decisions while remaining actively involved in design, development, and delivery.

What will you do?

  • Lead the design, development, and evolution of scalable Java back-end services
  • Build clean, maintainable, testable, and production-ready software
  • Own technical and architectural decisions across services and integrations
  • Design distributed systems, microservices, APIs, and event-driven workflows
  • Develop agentic AI solutions that can reason, plan, use tools, access enterprise data, and execute multi-step workflows
  • Integrate large language models using frameworks such as Spring AI, LangChain4j, or equivalent technologies
  • Design retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool-calling, memory, and human-in-the-loop patterns
  • Establish safeguards for AI systems, including access controls, data privacy, prompt-injection protection, output validation, and auditability
  • Define evaluation approaches for AI quality, reliability, latency, safety, and cost
  • Provide technical direction, mentoring, and constructive feedback to engineers
  • Lead code reviews, design reviews, proof-of-concept initiatives, and knowledge-sharing sessions
  • Collaborate closely with Product and business stakeholders to translate requirements into pragmatic technical solutions
  • Ensure high standards for performance, availability, observability, security, and operational readiness
  • Support and improve CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and engineering delivery processes
  • Participate in production support, incident analysis, and continuous service improvement Required knowledge and experience
  • 10+ years of software engineering experience, including experience leading technical initiatives or engineering teams
  • Strong hands-on experience with modern Java, preferably Java 17 or later
  • Advanced knowledge of Spring Boot and the broader Spring ecosystem
  • Experience designing and scaling microservice and event-driven architectures
  • Strong understanding of object-oriented design, functional programming concepts, design patterns, and clean architecture
  • Practical experience with Domain-Driven Design, CQRS, and Event Sourcing
  • Experience building secure, resilient, and high-performance REST and/or GraphQL APIs
  • Solid understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, fault tolerance, caching, and observability
  • Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar event-streaming technologies
  • Cloud-native development experience on AWS
  • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code practices
  • Experience with relational and non-relational databases
  • Strong knowledge of automated testing, including unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing
  • Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern software delivery practices
  • Experience working in Agile, cross-functional product development teams
  • Demonstrated ability to lead architectural discussions and communicate technical trade-offs clearly Agentic AI knowledge and experience
  • Practical experience building or integrating applications powered by large language models
  • Understanding of agentic AI patterns, including planning, tool use, workflow orchestration, reflection, memory, and multi-agent collaboration
  • Experience with Spring AI, LangChain4j, or comparable AI application frameworks
  • Knowledge of prompt engineering, structured outputs, function calling, embeddings, vector databases, and RAG
  • Experience integrating hosted or self-managed models from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, or open-source ecosystems
  • Understanding of AI evaluation, hallucination mitigation, grounding, observability, and responsible AI practices
  • Awareness of the security risks associated with LLM applications, including prompt injection, sensitive-data leakage, excessive agency, and unsafe tool execution
  • Ability to balance model quality, latency, reliability, privacy, and cost in production systems Preferred qualifications
  • Experience/Knowledge with Python for AI services, experimentation, or data-processing workloads
  • Experience with agent orchestration frameworks or durable workflow platforms
  • Familiarity with vector databases and hybrid search technologies
  • Experience with LLM observability, tracing, evaluation, and prompt-management platforms
  • Knowledge of MLOps, model gateways, and AI governance
  • Experience modernizing legacy Java platforms or guiding cloud migration initiatives
  • Experience working in regulated, high-security, or high-availability environments What will you bring as a colleague?
  • A hands-on leadership style and a willingness to take ownership
  • A critical-thinking mindset and the confidence to challenge assumptions constructively
  • The ability to make pragmatic decisions while maintaining a strong long-term technical vision
  • A growth mindset and a commitment to developing yourself and others
  • Strong mentoring, facilitation, and stakeholder-management skills
  • Curiosity about emerging AI technologies combined with sound engineering judgment
  • A collaborative approach to solving complex technical and product challenges
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English

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