Senior Software Engineer – Squad Lead (Java + React)
Location: Trivandrum, Kerala (Full-time, in-office)
Experience: 8+ years
About the Role:
We're hiring a seasoned engineer to lead a squad of 10+ developers and QA engineers on a long-term enterprise engagement. You will own delivery end to end: understanding client requirements, shaping wireframes with our UI/UX team, securing client sign-off, and shipping production-grade software. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a pure management track.
What You'll Do:
- Lead and mentor a cross-functional squad of 10+ engineers and QA, owning their growth, technical decisions, and delivery outcomes.
- Engage directly with client stakeholders to elicit requirements, translate them into wireframes alongside the UI/UX team, and drive them to approval.
- Architect and build scalable backend services in Java and Spring Boot, and modern web frontends in React.
- Run agile ceremonies effectively (sprint planning, refinement, retros, demos) and use them to keep the squad focused, unblocked, and accountable.
- Set and enforce engineering standards across the squad: clean code, code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, observability.
- Be the technical face of the squad to the client in design discussions, trade-off conversations, and status reviews.
What You Bring:
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep hands-on expertise in Java and Spring Boot (microservices, REST APIs, JPA, Spring Security) and React (hooks, state management, modern build tooling).
- Proven track record of leading squads of 10+ for sustained periods, including mentoring mid and junior engineers into stronger contributors.
- Strong experience working directly with clients in a product or services environment, including scope negotiation, demos, and approvals.
- Comfortable collaborating with UI/UX designers to shape wireframes and validate flows before development begins.
- Deep fluency in agile delivery and a pragmatic view on when to bend process to ship.
- Solid grasp of cloud (AWS preferred), containers, CI/CD, and modern engineering practices.
- Excellent written and spoken communication in English.
Nice to Have:
- Exposure to AI-assisted development workflows (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor or similar).
- Experience with event-driven systems (Kafka) and modern observability stacks.
- Background working with US, UK, or UAE enterprise clients.
