Senior Software Engineer (JVM)

Overview

Senior Software Engineer (JVM) building backend systems that move data through Nexla: JVM services, the streaming runtime on Kafka, and the distributed processing beneath it.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and ship core framework features, including schema evolution, pagination, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and automated retries and self-recovery.
• Write, document, and use the SDKs and interfaces that other teams build on.
• Operate the streaming and processing path in production, including Kafka, Spark, and Flink workloads, checkpointing, backpressure, and failure recovery.
• Make design decisions within your scope and contribute to decisions above it, including tradeoffs in multi-tenancy, concurrency, and latency.
• Trace failures across Kafka clusters, distributed runtimes, and flaky third-party APIs, fix them, and build guardrails to prevent recurrence.
• Spend roughly 70% of time building and shipping, 15% on design and technical discussion, and 15% on code review and RFCs, runbooks, and docs.

What you'll need

• 6 to 10 years of software engineering experience, with some of it on backend platforms, services, or SDKs rather than only end-user applications.
• Strong Java, including understanding of JVM memory management, concurrency models, and non-blocking I/O.
• Hands-on experience running distributed systems in production, such as Kafka, Spark, Flink, or similar.
• Comfort with the modern data stack and related protocols, such as Snowflake, Databricks, gRPC, GraphQL, webhooks, and CDC.
• Experience owning production systems and good operational discipline.
• Use of AI tools in your actual work, and the ability to say specifically where they help and where they mislead.

Nice to have

• Contributions to open-source data projects such as Airbyte, Flink, Debezium, or Arrow.
• Experience at an iPaaS or ELT company such as MuleSoft, Fivetran, Informatica, Airbyte, or similar.
• Deep Kubernetes and cloud-native experience, including Strimzi for Kafka.
• Security architecture experience with OAuth 2.0, mTLS, and encrypted credential management at scale.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.
• Work mode: hybrid, 2 days per week in office.
• Must overlap with morning Pacific hours for syncs, design reviews, and collaboration with US-based leadership and engineering teams.
• Hiring process: four conversations over about two weeks (coding, low-level design, high-level design, hiring manager).