We're a US-based product company building a distributed automation platform that orchestrates a physical Android device fleet from a Kotlin/Spring Boot core. The system is in active production use, partially built, and needs a senior backend engineer for completion work — finishing the remaining V1 scope, hardening the reliability layer, and demonstrating sustained unattended operation under production load.
Technical surface: Kotlin/Spring Boot 3.2 on Java 17 for the orchestration layer, Apache Kafka for event streaming, Redisson for distributed locking across the cluster, PostgreSQL for transactional state, Neo4j for relationship graphs, Redis for caching. Worker layer is Node.js running Playwright for browser automation and Appium for physical Android device control. Frontend is React/TypeScript/Vite/Tailwind. Production runs on Docker with Jenkins CI/CD and Prometheus/Grafana for observability.
What we need: a senior engineer with real Java or Kotlin distributed systems experience, production debugging stories around Kafka consumer rebalancing or distributed lock contention, database engineering at scale, and the judgment that comes from inheriting complex codebases and shipping clean releases out of them. Fluent use of AI-augmented engineering tools (Claude Code, etc) is expected as part of daily workflow.
You'd have technical execution authority over how the work gets done, code quality standards, and engineering process. Founder retains authority over what gets built, scope priorities, and tradeoff decisions. This is completion engineering with senior autonomy on execution, not greenfield architecture or product ownership.
Engagement is structured as 2-week sprints with milestone-based payment tied to verifiable deliverables agreed at the start of each sprint. First sprint is a behavioral audit of the existing codebase. Subsequent sprints address the prioritized completion scope. Either side can adjust scope or end the engagement at sprint boundaries.
Available immediately. Remote-friendly. Compensation discussed during initial conversation based on your experience and engagement preferences. Direct contractor relationship, no agency markup.
If this fits, send a brief note covering: (1) your strongest distributed systems debugging story, (2) your experience inheriting and shipping production work from partially-built codebases, and (3) when you can start.
Required languages
| English | C1 - Advanced |