Senior Forward Deployment Engineer

- Collaborate directly with development teams to identify and resolve issues related to testing, security, release, deployment, resilience, and legacy technologies.

- Review application code, dependencies, test coverage, runtime configurations, deployment processes, logs, monitoring systems, and CI/CD pipelines.

- Write, debug, test, review, and enhance production application code and configurations.

- Develop and maintain automated unit, integration, component, regression, and deployment smoke tests.

- Apply Test-Driven Development practices and select appropriate testing approaches with guidance as needed.

- Source test data and apply masking techniques to protect sensitive information in lower environments.

- Investigate vulnerabilities and dependency risks, identify root causes, implement secure remediation, and conduct regression testing.

- Upgrade Java/JVM or NPM runtimes, Spring components, libraries, dependencies, base images, operating systems, and installed software.

- Assist in implementing automated and continuous dependency updates using Renovate or comparable tools.

- Support modernization efforts for legacy applications and middleware stacks, including WebSphere or WebLogic when applicable.

- Containerize applications using Docker and deploy or support them on OpenShift platforms.

- Enhance Git workflows, branch management, pull requests, and code-review processes.

- Implement and improve CI/CD pipelines, automated quality gates, deployment validation, and rollback procedures.

- Automate database changes using Liquibase or similar migration tools.

- Support application and environment automation through Ansible or equivalent tools.

- Apply secure coding patterns and adhere to standards for secrets management, authentication, authorization, and handling sensitive data.

- Improve structured logging, exception handling, health checks, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and operational alerts.

- Support highly available and resilient deployment strategies.

- Troubleshoot production and non-production issues using code analysis, SQL, logs, metrics, traces, and diagnostic tools.

- Communicate progress, risks, technical decisions, blockers, and dependencies to engineering, security, architecture, operations, project management, and client stakeholders.

- Document implemented solutions and facilitate knowledge transfer to development and support teams.

- Own a defined technical workstream from assessment and implementation through testing, deployment, and stabilization.

Mandatory Skills Description:

The role requires strong professional software engineering expertise, typically spanning 4–7 years, including recent hands-on development of production applications. The candidate must actively write and debug code, with recent experience directly involving production code or configuration changes made within the last 12–18 months.

Hard skills include:

- Advanced Java and JVM development, with strong TypeScript skills valued for Node.js environments.

- Practical experience with Spring or similar enterprise frameworks.

- Proficiency in Test-Driven Development, automated testing, and familiarity with multiple test frameworks and automation approaches.

- Capability to develop unit and integration tests and support deployment smoke testing.

- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated builds, quality gates, and application deployments.

- Knowledge of secure coding practices and experience addressing application vulnerabilities.

- Experience upgrading runtimes, frameworks, libraries, dependencies, and operating systems.

- Familiarity with Docker and containerized application delivery.

- Working knowledge of OpenShift, Kubernetes, or comparable container platforms.

- Competence in Linux command-line tools and production troubleshooting.

- Experience with build tools such as Maven, Gradle, or npm.

- Strong Git and source control practices, including branching, pull requests, and code reviews.

- Skills in troubleshooting applications using SQL, logs, metrics, traces, stack traces, and monitoring tools.

- Understanding of observability concepts, structured logging, exception handling, health checks, and production support.

- Knowledge of transactions, retries, idempotency, rollback, resilience, and distributed system failure patterns.