Your experience or knowledge checks most of these boxes

o Excellent programmer, preferably in Java – Intermediate (Collections, Polymorphism, Design Patterns) to

Expert level (Annotations, Lambda, Streaming, Concurrency)

o Good knowledge of data structures and algorithms – if methods you write are in traffic request path, you

know how to avoid unacceptable time complexity

o Thorough knowledge of REST Framework like Spring Boot (or Lagom), REST Maturity Levels, good and bad

practices of REST

o Where to use non-REST frameworks like gRPC over Thrift or Protobuf

o Nuances of TCP, UDP, HTTP, HTTP2, SSL

o Thorough understanding of designing distributed systems without single point of failures that self-heal and

stay responsive during failures

o How to stop cascading failures by implementing fallbacks, graceful degradation, back pressure, circuit

breaker, request collapsing/caching, adaptive concurrency limits – Hystrix, Resilience4J

o Choosing the right data store for the given requirements – Relational, Graph, Object, Document, Columnar,

Key-Value. We use Oracle, MySQL, Mongo, Cassandra

o Usage of mid-tier caches – define the right keys, how to partition them, setting TTLs. We use Redis,

Memcache, EHCache, Hazelcast, Aerospike.

o Load Balancing and Adaptive Routing across nodes

o Implementing distributed paradigms like tune-able eventual consistency, CQRS, Event sourcing

o Understanding the implications of asynchronous communication and non-blocking IO

o Nuances of using different servers – embedded vs standalone, Tomcat, Undertow, Netty, Jetty

o Designing systems for achieving low latency, low error rate and high throughput

o X, Y, Z cubes of scaling – by cloning, sharding and breaking into microservices. Applying the right trade-offs

using CAP (Consistency, Availability and tolerance to network Partition)

o Compliance to 12-factor app and solid understanding of different layers in the services stack – Load Balancer,

API Gateway, Service Discovery, Central Config Management, Feature toggle, etc.

o Understanding of Data Streaming and Messaging frameworks like Apache Spark, Storm, Flink, Kafka

Your Qualities as an Engineer

o You are a champion at Code reviews and Unit/Mock/integration Tests

o You have a strong sense of ownership of what you design and deploy

o You provide strong technical mentorship to team members

o You are an excellent team player

o You continuously learn and improve