Senior Java Developer (6-month Contract)

About the role

As a Software Development Engineer II in the CMS Engineering team, you will design, build, and operate scalable backend systems that power our content platform. You will develop Java and Spring Boot services and APIs that make CMS workflows faster, safer, and easier to operate. You will work on core domain services, integrations, validations, automation, processing visibility, and auditability across the CMS and adjacent platforms. The role involves end-to-end ownership of complex engineering initiatives, meaningful contributions to system architecture, and a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and operational excellence.

About the Team

The CMS Engineering team builds and operates critical systems across the content lifecycle, from post-ingestion management through rollout and downstream delivery. Our services process large volumes of content and metadata daily for a global audience, with a focus on reliability, low latency, scalability, and quality of experience. We collaborate closely with Ingestion, Playback, Content Operations, Recommendations, Search, Video Engineering, and other downstream teams to deliver content and metadata quickly and reliably. If you are passionate about distributed systems and the technology that powers large-scale content platforms, this is an opportunity to work on high-impact systems.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement Java services, REST APIs, asynchronous workflows, and integration components for CMS and content-operations use cases.
• Build workflow automation and bulk-operation capabilities that reduce repetitive Ops effort and turnaround time.
• Develop robust metadata validation, business-rule enforcement, publishing, scheduling, and downstream-transfer controls.
• Integrate CMS with RMS and other internal content, asset, and video-side services; manage contracts, retries, idempotency, and failure handling.
• Improve observability through processing status, searchable operational data, actionable logs, metrics, traces, and dashboards.
• Implement audit trails and traceability for cataloging, processing, metadata changes, and administrative actions.
• Own production readiness: testing, performance, resilience, security, deployment, on-call support, and incident follow-through.
• Partner with Frontend and Full Stack Engineers to shape APIs that are intuitive, evolvable, and aligned to user workflows.

Requirements

• 3+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, with a strong track record building and operating distributed systems in production.
• Proficiency in Java, Spring Boot and Python with solid foundations in system design.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) — including compute, object storage (S3), managed queues (SQS/SNS), and serverless or containerized workloads.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems design: event-driven architectures, message queues (Kafka), workflow orchestration, and idempotency patterns.
• Experience with storage systems, caching strategies (Redis, Memcached), and database query performance tuning.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Comfort with observability tooling — logging, metrics, and tracing — and a habit of building production-ready services from day one.
• Strong communication skills — able to clearly articulate technical approaches and trade-offs to peers, leads, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborative team player who takes pride in lifting up those around them through mentorship and knowledge sharing.

Preferred education and experience

• Bachelors/Masters in Computer Science or a related field with 3+ years of experience in backend development