Senior Java Developer

We are hiring a Java Developer - Senior with our client in Chicago, IL for a hybrid role.

Job Details:

Role: Java Developer (Senior)

Location: Chicago, IL - hybrid

Key Areas: AI-DLC

Senior Developer - Notifications Platform & AI Engineering

Description - External

Domain: Airlines.

Experience: 12+ YOE

Eligibility: USC, GC,L2S, EADs

Type: Contract-W2/ FTE

Summary:

United's Digital Technology team designs, develops, and maintains massively scaling technology solutions brought to life with innovative architectures, data analytics, digital solutions, and practical AI-enabled capabilities.

The Notifications team enables enterprise communication capabilities supporting customer and crew portfolios. This contractor role will focus on hands-on design, development, modernization, and production delivery of notification platform services, integrations, event-driven capabilities, and AI-enabled communication use cases.

Key Responsibilities:

The role of Senior Developer will have a technical focus on enabling Notifications at the enterprise level and supporting a robust communication platform for customer and crew portfolios. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role. This is not a management role. The expectation is to actively design, code, debug, optimize, deploy, and support production-grade solutions.

• Design AND implement core services for the enterprise Notifications platform, including APIs, event-driven integrations, orchestration components, templates, and platform capabilities.

• Write, review, debug, and optimize production code actively; lead through hands-on engineering contribution rather than delegation.

• Build cloud-native backend services using Java, Spring Boot, Apache Camel, microservices, container technologies, and AWS services.

• Develop and integrate AI/GenAI capabilities hands-on, including prompt design, LLM integration, RAG pipelines, embeddings/vector search, semantic search, classification, summarization, and AI-assisted communication workflows.

• Prototype, validate, and productionize AI-enabled features while considering latency, accuracy, cost, monitoring, fallback design, and operational reliability.

• Design solutions for high availability, scalability, resiliency, observability, performance, security, privacy, and compliance needs.

• Support integrations with internal enterprise systems, eventing platforms, data providers, communication providers, and vendor-managed services as needed.

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues directly, including performance bottlenecks, integration failures, data issues, and system reliability concerns.

• Work closely with architects, product owners, business stakeholders, development teams, and vendor teams to convert requirements into working solutions.

• Contribute to technical design, system documentation, code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, release readiness, and production support practices.

• Ensure solutions are aligned with enterprise engineering standards, security expectations, and application lifecycle best practices.

• Mentor developers through code-level guidance, design reviews, and engineering best practices; however, the primary expectation remains hands-on delivery.

Qualifications - External

What is needed to succeed (Minimum Qualifications):

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, related field, or equivalent work experience required.

• Minimum 8 years of overall experience in software engineering, application development, integration, and SDLC delivery.

• Strong recent hands-on software development experience; candidate must be comfortable spending majority of time coding, debugging, designing, and delivering working software.

• Minimum 8 years of hands-on Java backend development experience, including Spring Boot, REST APIs, microservices, and open-source technologies.

• Minimum 3 years of hands-on experience with event-driven systems, messaging, streaming, integration, or notification platform capabilities.

• Hands-on experience with Apache Camel or equivalent enterprise integration frameworks.

• Minimum 4 years of hands-on experience with AWS or equivalent cloud services such as EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, CloudFront, Lambda, EKS, ECS, API Gateway, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, AmazonMQ, or related services.

• Strong hands-on AI/GenAI implementation experience in enterprise or production-grade applications; AI experience should not be limited to strategy, vendor discussions, or conceptual understanding.

• Practical experience involves personally implementing one or more AI capabilities such as LLM integration, prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings/vector search, semantic search, classification, summarization, AI-assisted workflow automation, or decision-support capabilities.

• Understanding responsible AI and secure AI engineering practices, including data privacy, access control, guardrails, evaluation, monitoring, hallucination risk, human review where needed, and auditability.

• Experience with observability and analytics tools such as Dynatrace, ELK Stack, CloudWatch, or equivalent tools.

• Experience working in agile delivery environments where CI/CD, automated testing, code quality, deployment readiness, and production support are critical.

• Demonstrated knowledge of software engineering best practices such as version control, software packaging, release management, automated testing, secure coding, and operational readiness.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with ability to diagnose complex technical issues independently.

• Must be self-motivated, collaborative, and able to communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What will help you propel from the pack (Preferred Qualifications):

• Experience designing and developing enterprise notification, communication, customer messaging, content management, or eventing platform solutions.

• Experience with Twilio or similar communication/messaging platforms.

• Experience applying AI to communication use cases such as personalization, routing, prioritization, content quality checks, template assistance, intent classification, summarization, or operational anomaly detection.

• Experience with AI observability, LLMOps/MLOps practices, model/prompt evaluation, AI guardrails, and production monitoring of AI-enabled features.

• AWS certification or equivalent cloud certification.

• Experience in high-scale, 24x7 production environments.

• Airline, travel, customer platforms, or crew operations domain experience.

Candidate Profile Guidance for Vendors:

• Submit candidates with strong hands-on individual contributor experience, not primarily people management profiles.

• Candidate should show recent coding and production delivery experience in Java/backend/cloud systems.

• Candidate should have real implementation experience in AI/GenAI capabilities, not only AI awareness, training, governance, or tool evaluation experience.

• Profiles that are architecture-only, governance-heavy, or delivery-management focused without recent hands-on coding will not be a fit.

Role Type:

• Senior hands-on individual contributor role within the Notifications platform team.

• Primary focus is hands-on engineering delivery, production support, and AI-enabled platform implementation.