Sr. Director Backend Engineer (Java)

Powering Performance Marketplaces in Digital Media

QuinStreet is a pioneer in powering decentralized online marketplaces that match searchers and “research and compare” consumers with brands. We run these virtual- and private-label marketplaces in one of the nation’s largest media networks.

Our industry leading segmentation and AI-driven matching technologies help consumers find better solutions and brands faster. They allow brands to target and reach in-market customer prospects with pinpoint segment-by-segment accuracy, and to pay only for performance results.

Our campaign-results-driven matching decision engines and optimization algorithms are built from over 20 years and billions of dollars of online media experience.

We believe in:

• The direct measurability of digital media.

• Performance marketing. (We pioneered it.)

• The advantages of technology.

We bring all this together to deliver truly great results for consumers and brands in the world’s biggest channel.

Senior Director, Platform Engineering (Individual Contributor)

Quest v2 Migration Technical Lead

Location: Pune, India (Hybrid) Experience: 10+ Years

About the Role

We are seeking a hands-on technical leader to drive the modernization of Quest, a high-volume event and workflow-processing platform handling tens of millions of events daily. This is an individual contributor role, comparable to a Principal or Senior Staff Engineer, responsible for leading the technical execution of the Quest v2 migration while guiding a team of approximately 10 engineers and QA professionals.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of Quest v2 migration initiatives.

• Develop production-grade Java and Spring Boot applications for high-volume, event-driven systems.

• Define engineering patterns for event processing, state management, testing, deployment, and recovery.

• Design and optimize Kafka-based event processing, ensuring scalability, reliability, idempotency, and fault tolerance.

• Resolve application and MySQL scalability bottlenecks through schema optimization, caching, partitioning, and asynchronous processing.

• Conduct architecture reviews, code reviews, performance tuning, and production troubleshooting.

• Establish migration strategies, including coexistence, cutover, rollback, reconciliation, and validation between Quest v1 and Quest v2.

• Drive production readiness, resilience testing, and operational excellence.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with significant hands-on development and technical leadership.

• Strong expertise in Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, and event-driven architectures.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including concurrency, eventual consistency, idempotency, event ordering, fault tolerance, and horizontal scaling.

• Strong MySQL performance tuning, schema design, and scalability experience.

• Experience with Redis, REST APIs, asynchronous workflows, and high-volume production systems.

• Proven experience modernizing legacy platforms and migrating live production workloads.

• Strong troubleshooting, performance optimization, and root-cause analysis capabilities.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and containerized Java applications.

• Expertise in distributed workflows, Domain-Driven Design, and microservices modernization.

• Experience with observability, distributed tracing, resilience frameworks, and JVM performance tuning.

• Background in FinTech, Insurance, Lead Generation, or other large-scale transaction-processing platforms.

What We're Looking For

• A highly technical leader who leads through hands-on contribution and engineering excellence.

• Strong decision-maker with the ability to balance scalability, reliability, delivery timelines, and migration risk.

• Passion for building resilient, scalable systems and mentoring teams through technical leadership.

Note: This role does not include people management, product management, project management, infrastructure ownership, or Kubernetes administration. It focuses on technical leadership, architecture, migration execution, scalability, reliability, and production readiness.

QuinStreet is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, pregnancy status, sex, age, marital status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other characteristics protected by law.

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