Staff Engineer

Overview

Staff Engineer for WebCenter Enterprise, an established Java/J2EE packaging and artwork management web application, to act as the lead technical authority on its product architecture and its integration with Esko's Packaging Cloud platform. This is an individual-contributor role on the technical leadership track.

What you'll do

• Own and evolve WebCenter's product-level architecture across the presentation, application, and database tiers, with depth in backend services, relational data, integration, security, performance, and scalability.
• Write and review production code, build prototypes and technical spikes, investigate difficult defects, and contribute to complex implementation work.
• Carry important architectural decisions through implementation and validation rather than stopping at design documents.
• Partner with product management, engineering, and business stakeholders to clarify requirements, identify constraints, and explain alternatives, trade-offs, risks, and recommendations.
• Anticipate technical dependencies, resolve difficult design issues, and work with technical leads to break architectural changes into achievable implementation steps.
• Coordinate decisions with adjacent teams when changes cross product boundaries.
• Mentor and train a small group of engineers through pairing, design and code reviews, focused learning sessions, and ongoing technical guidance.
• Align engineers around a shared technical approach and delivery goal for an epic or significant initiative.
• Work with Esko's cloud platform architects and engineering teams to design and implement the technical bridge between WebCenter and Esko's Cloud Platform, respecting the platform's access-management model, service boundaries, and operational requirements.
• Architect the evolution of integration technologies that enable a single-tenant web application to leverage multi-tenant cloud services, designing for reliable coexistence and incremental evolution.
• Choose appropriate synchronous and asynchronous integration patterns, addressing compatibility, versioning, retries, idempotency, data consistency, and partial failures.
• Plan staged adoption and migration where needed without unnecessarily disrupting existing customer workflows.
• Support root-cause analysis of complex issues and strengthen performance diagnostics, observability, testability, resilience, capacity planning, and operational readiness.
• Identify architectural risks and maintain a pragmatic technical-debt improvement plan balancing product health with roadmap delivery, compatibility, and customer commitments.
• Author and maintain architecture decision records (ADRs), design documentation, product-level technical standards, and implementation guidance.
• Collaborate with the DevOps team on delivery and operational needs, proposing CI/CD or infrastructure changes only where they address a demonstrated product or delivery need.
• Drive pragmatic innovation in WebCenter and its development practices, including selectively exploring AI-assisted and agentic engineering tools, while protecting company and customer information and independently validating outputs.

What you'll need

• At least 12 years of relevant software-engineering experience, including extensive, recent hands-on work designing, developing, and evolving substantial Java/J2EE enterprise web applications.
• Demonstrated architectural impact and implementation depth; tenure alone is not sufficient.
• Proven architectural responsibility for large, production-grade, three-tier web applications covering browser-based front ends, Java application services, and relational databases.
• Experience working within a mature codebase with established customer workflows, upgrade requirements, and compatibility constraints.
• Evidence of taking significant architectural changes from design into production, including evaluating alternatives, guiding implementation, contributing code, validating outcomes, and addressing operational issues.
• Deep Java backend engineering expertise, including object-oriented design, concurrency, transaction management, RESTful APIs, integration patterns, security, and performance diagnostics.
• Hands-on experience deploying, configuring, and troubleshooting enterprise Java applications on WildFly and/or Apache Tomcat, including connection pooling, thread management, and JVM tuning.
• Experience monitoring running Java applications using JMX and related diagnostic tools to investigate runtime behavior, resource usage, and production issues.
• Well versed in software design patterns, with the ability to select, apply, and advocate for their appropriate use in design and code reviews.
• Strong relational database expertise with substantial hands-on experience in Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and/or Oracle, including data modeling, complex SQL, execution-plan analysis, indexing, locking and isolation, transaction behavior, performance tuning, and safe schema and data migrations.
• A working understanding of the complete web application stack, including browser-to-server interactions, HTTP, sessions, authentication and authorization, and the impact of backend and database decisions on user experience. The ability to diagnose problems across tiers is essential; deep expertise in a particular front-end framework is not required.
• Experience architecting and implementing integrations between enterprise applications and external services or platforms, including API contracts, service boundaries, secure access, data consistency, error handling, and backward compatibility, supported by sound distributed-systems fundamentals.
• Deep understanding of application and API security, including authentication, authorization, trust boundaries, and secure handling of credentials and sensitive data.
• A track record of independently resolving ambiguous, high-impact technical problems and making proportionate decisions that balance technical quality, delivery, risk, cost, and customer impact.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to document decisions and explain architecture, trade-offs, and technical risks to engineers, product leaders, business stakeholders, and non-technical audiences such as customer support.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through influence, including design and code reviews, mentoring, and collaboration across engineering teams.
• An innovation mindset and demonstrated ability to learn quickly and enable others, curious and proactive in evaluating relevant technologies and sharing knowledge.
• Sound judgment when evolving established products, favoring effective use of the existing technology stack and incremental modernization over technology change for its own sake.

Nice to have

• Experience working in Agile product development and geographically distributed engineering teams.
• Experience connecting an established Java enterprise application to a cloud platform while preserving existing deployment models, customer workflows, and compatibility.
• Hands-on experience designing or delivering cloud-based products or hybrid architectures on AWS, with practical knowledge of relevant compute, container, networking, storage, identity, observability, and integration services.
• Experience integrating applications with centralized identity and access management, including SSO, identity federation, OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect or SAML, service-to-service authentication, and mapping application permissions to platform access controls.
• Experience with enterprise search technologies such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, including indexing strategies, query performance, relevance, synchronization with source data, and operational troubleshooting.
• Experience with messaging, event-driven integration, asynchronous processing, and incremental modernization patterns, with sound judgment about when these approaches add value.
• Experience leading a technical team, major architecture initiative, or cross-team engineering effort, with or without formal management responsibility.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted or agentic development tools for implementation, refactoring, testing, and codebase analysis, while protecting company and customer information and independently validating generated outputs.

Details

• Location: Bangalore, India
• Work mode: Hybrid
• Individual-contributor role; formal team-lead or people-management experience is welcome but not required.