Lead Software Engineer - Platform Architect

JPMorgan Chase JPMorgan Chase · Banking · Palo Alto, CA +1 · Commercial & Investment Bank

Lead Software Engineer focused on architecting and building low-latency, high-throughput OLTP systems for financial applications, emphasizing performance, scalability, and reliability within a regulated environment. The role involves designing, developing, and optimizing Java/Spring Boot applications, distributed systems, and real-time event streaming pipelines.

What you'd actually do

  1. Regularly provides technical guidance and direction to support the business and its technical teams, contractors, and vendors, with a focus on low-latency Java/Spring Boot OLTP architectures and enterprise messaging patterns
  2. Develops secure and high-quality production code and reviews and debugs code with an emphasis on latency-critical code paths, lock-free data structures, and efficient memory allocation
  3. Drives decisions that influence the product design, application functionality, and technical operations and processes
  4. Serves as a function-wide subject matter expert in low-latency OLTP systems, real-time transactional processing, and event-driven architectures across the Java/JVM ecosystem
  5. Architect and implement distributed OLTP applications to minimize transactional latency

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of applied experience building low-latency, high-throughput OLTP systems in Java
  • Hands-on practical experience delivering system design, application development, testing, and operational stability for latency-sensitive transactional platforms using Spring Boot
  • Advanced proficiency in Java (11/17/21+) with deep understanding of concurrency primitives, JVM internals, GC tuning, and performance-critical coding patterns
  • Expert-level knowledge of relational databases including execution plan analysis, index optimization, lock contention reduction, partitioning strategies for OLTP workloads
  • Proven experience designing low-latency APIs including Protocol Buffers schema design, connection multiplexing, streaming RPCs, and API rate limiting under high-concurrency conditions
  • Deep expertise with Apache Kafka for real-time event streaming in OLTP pipelines, including producer batching/compression tuning, consumer lag minimization, partition strategies for ordered processing, and JMS-based messaging (IBM MQ, ActiveMQ) for guaranteed delivery in transactional workflows
  • Ability to tackle design and functionality problems independently with little to no oversight
  • Practical cloud-native experience, including containerized deployment of latency-critical Spring Boot services
  • Experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field
  • Strong communication and collaboration skills for working in cross-functional teams

Nice to have

  • Experience designing high-availability, multi-region active-active OLTP architectures with synchronous/asynchronous replication, conflict resolution, and sub-millisecond failover strategies
  • Hands-on experience with low-latency data access patterns
  • Prior experience in real-time payments, fraud detection, or financial transaction processing where strict data consistency are non-negotiable
  • Strong knowledge of database security, access controls, and regulatory compliance
  • Familiarity with performance engineering tooling: JVM profilers, load testing frameworks, and systematic latency benchmarking (p50/p99/p999) across the full Spring Boot/Kafka/gRPC/JMS stack

What the JD emphasized

  • low-latency
  • high-throughput
  • OLTP systems
  • latency-critical
  • transactional processing
  • real-time event streaming
  • sub-millisecond response times