Sr Java Engineer

Software Guidance & Assistance, Inc., (SGA), is searching for an Sr Java Engineer for a CONTRACT assignment with one of our premier INSURANCE clients in CHARLOTTE, NC (Hybrid Schedule).

We are looking for a Senior Java Developer who will serve as a dedicated engineering efficiency champion across multiple application teams. Unlike typical feature developers, this role is singularly focused on identifying, building, and shipping improvements that raise productivity, code quality, and operational maturity of the entire engineering organization—with a strong emphasis on leveraging AI tooling.

You will embed with different application teams, understand their codebases and business contexts rapidly, and deliver pull requests that introduce automation, reduce toil, improve CI/CD pipelines, and integrate AI‑assisted development practices.

• Cross‑team engineering efficiency: rotate across multiple application teams to identify efficiency bottlenecks, technical debt, and automation opportunities, and deliver production‑ready pull requests that improve build times, test coverage, deployment reliability, and developer experience.
• Establish reusable patterns, shared libraries, and internal tooling that all teams can use.
• AI‑powered development practices: evaluate and integrate AI coding assistants (e.g., Git Hub Copilot, custom LLM‑based tools), build AI‑powered utilities such as automated code review bots, intelligent test generators, documentation generators, and PR summarizers, and champion AI‑augmented development practices while training teams on effective prompt engineering and AI‑assisted coding techniques.
• Identify high‑ROI areas where AI can accelerate development cycles and reduce repetitive tasks.
• CI/CD & Dev Ops improvement: optimize and extend existing CI/CD pipelines (build, test, deploy) for Spring Boot microservices on AWS ECS, implement automated quality gates, security scanning, dependency vulnerability checks, and performance regression tests, reduce deployment cycle times and improve rollback capabilities across environments.
• Codebase health & modernization: refactor legacy patterns, remove dead code, improve architectural consistency across Java/Spring Boot applications, enhance observability by improving logging, tracing, monitoring instrumentation, standardize database query patterns, connection pooling, and Postgre
  
  SQL performance tuning.

• 10+ years of hands‑on Java development with deep expertise in Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA, and RESTful API design.
• Proven ability to quickly understand and navigate large, unfamiliar codebases and grasp business context rapidly.
• Strong experience with Postgre
  
  SQL or other relational/non‑relational databases, including query optimization, indexing strategies, and schema design.
• Solid working knowledge of AWS services, specifically ECS (Fargate/EC2), ECR, Cloud Watch, RDS, S3, and IAM.
• Hands‑on experience designing, building, and optimizing CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Git Hub Actions, Code Pipeline, or similar).
• Proficiency with Docker and container orchestration on AWS ECS.
• Familiarity with Angular front‑end development, ability to read, review, and make targeted improvements.
• Strong Git workflow skills: branching strategies, code review, conflict resolution, and PR best practices.
• Excellent problem‑solving ability and self‑starter mentality, able to operate independently with minimal direction.

• Experience integrating AI/ML tools into developer workflows (Copilot, Code Whisperer, etc.).
• Background in developer experience (DX) or platform engineering roles focused on internal tooling.
• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, Cloud Formation) and configuration management.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (Datadog, New Relic, ELK, or Prometheus/Grafana).
• Contributions to open‑source projects or internal developer tooling initiatives.
• Knowledge of security best practices, OWASP guidelines, and automated security scanning tools.

Backend:
Java 17+, Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA, Spring Security, REST APIs.

Frontend:
Angular (Type Script).

CI/CD:
Jenkins / Git Hub Actions / AWS Code Pipeline…