Event-driven architecture (choreography vs. orchestration, eventual consistency, outbox pattern)
12-factor app principles as a baseline design discipline
Platform, Containers & Delivery
Azure DevOps (pipelines as code, release management, boards)
Docker (writing/reading Dockerfiles, image optimization)
Kubernetes (pods, services, ConfigMaps/Secrets, HPA, resource limits)
Helm charts and GitOps-based deployment (ArgoCD)
Testing & Quality Gates
JUnit 5, Mockito, Testcontainers
Contract testing (Pact), static analysis (SonarQube/Checkstyle)
Chaos/resilience testing awareness
Observability & Reliability
Structured logging, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry/Jaeger)
Metrics, dashboards, SLO/SLI-based alerting
Resilience patterns: circuit breakers/bulkheads (Resilience4j), rate limiting
Security
OWASP Top 10, secure coding practices
Secrets management (Key Vault/External Secrets Operator)
OAuth2/OIDC, service-to-service auth, dependency vulnerability scanning (Trivy/Snyk)
Modern Engineering Practices
Effective, critical use of AI coding assistants (code generation, review, test/doc generation) without over-trusting output
Expectations
Designs service boundaries and evaluates microservice vs. modular monolith trade-offs for new capabilities
Leads event-driven design decisions: schema evolution strategy, backward/forward compatibility, dead-letter handling, idempotency
Makes and documents architecture decisions (ADRs) with awareness of long-term maintenance cost
Owns performance: query optimization, caching strategy (Redis), connection pool tuning, JVM tuning basics
Designs Helm charts and GitOps-based deployment pipelines (ArgoCD); understands HPA and resource planning at scale
Drives quality gates: static analysis (SonarQube/Checkstyle), contract testing (Pact), mutation testing where appropriate; owns test pyramid strategy for the team
Designs for observability from day one: sets SLOs/SLIs, structured logging, distributed tracing, cost-aware alerting — not bolted on after an incident
Applies resilience patterns proactively (circuit breakers, bulkheads, rate limiting) rather than reactively after outages
Understands security deeply: threat modeling, dependency vulnerability management, least-privilege service accounts, zero-trust service-to-service auth
Comfortable operating across Spring Boot and Quarkus, and can make a reasoned recommendation for which fits a given service
Can lead incident response: root cause analysis, blameless postmortems, follow-through on remediation
Mentors medior/junior developers through pairing and code review, not just gatekeeping
Evaluates where AI-assisted tooling (code review, test generation, documentation) genuinely improves team velocity vs. where it introduces risk
Balances pragmatism vs. purism — knows when "clean" should yield to "shipped," and can defend that call
Quality mindset markers
Treats clean architecture as a tool for change, not a religion — pushes back when it's used to over-engineer
Actively reduces coupling across the ~100-service scale, not just within their own service
Champions quality gates and test strategy for the team, not just their own PRs
Educational qualification
Bachelor of Engineering in any of the below mentioned.
Computer Science (CSE)
Information Technology (IT)
Electronics & Communications Engineering (ECE)
Information Science / Software Engineering
Experience
8+ years, with demonstrable ownership of non-trivial systems
Mandatory/requires Skills
Preferred Skills
high level of collaboration with the stake holders
better communication skills