[Hiring] Senior Java Backend Engineer @Aquent

Role Description

The Personalization (PZN) team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. We seek to understand the world of music, podcasts, and audiobooks better than anyone else so that we can make great recommendations to every individual and keep the world listening. Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world use the products we build, which include destinations like Home and Search as well as original personalized playlists such as Made For You, Discover Weekly, and Daily Mix.

The SeshGen product area builds and runs the systems behind generative and interactive listening experiences, including AI DJ, AI Playlist, and personalized sessions. SeshGen owns over 1,000 backend services, and many of them are stable and in maintenance mode. We are building a dedicated contractor team to own the operation and maintenance of these services, so our product squads can focus on new features.

What You'll Do

• Be part of the SeshGen goalie rotation for maintenance-mode services: respond to and triage PagerDuty alerts, apply fixes (restarts, rollbacks, scaling), and escalate to the owning squad when needed.
• Keep services up to date: dependency updates and security patches on a quarterly cycle, and infrastructure upgrades such as Kubernetes version bumps and GCP migrations.
• Reduce alert noise: tune thresholds, fix auto-resolving alerts, set up alert grouping, and turn off alerts that are not actionable.
• Identify unused services and decommission them safely using Backstage tooling.
• Write and maintain runbooks and service documentation for every service in scope.
• Keep the service catalog accurate: component ownership, reliability tiers, and PagerDuty routing.
• Work closely with SeshGen engineers and engineering managers through handovers, rotation chapter meetings, and alert reviews.
• Reduce tech debt and complexity if needed.
• Drive architecture discussions and create system designs in alignment with internal teams.
• Drive scoping and roadmapping of the technical execution.
• Track progress, escalate issues, and help unblock the team.

Qualifications

• You have experience operating distributed, high-volume backend services in production, and you know how to deploy them and keep them running.
• You are comfortable triaging incidents on systems you did not build, using runbooks, dashboards, and logs.
• You have hands-on experience with Java backend services.
• You have experience with monitoring and alerting tools such as PagerDuty, Grafana, and Prometheus/PromQL.
• You write clear documentation and enjoy leaving systems better than you found them.
• You are comfortable using AI coding tools to speed up maintenance and migration work.
• You communicate clearly and work well asynchronously with distributed teams.

Requirements

• Top 3 Hard Skills: Senior-level Java backend development, operating and maintaining distributed high-volume production systems, and scaling systems and removing technical debt.
• Top 3 Soft Skills: Strong written and verbal communication, effective prioritization skills, and cross-team collaboration and alignment.
• Nice-to-Have Skills: Kubernetes, GCP, Python, experience maintaining ultra-high-volume systems serving hundreds of millions of users, fast-paced non-music industry experience, or prior contractor experience.
• Strategic Role & Influence: The role stabilizes core systems serving hundreds of thousands of users, enabling internal squads to develop new AI features. Influence is exerted through technical steering groups and cross-team operational alignment.

Benefits

• W2, Benefits and 401k matching.
• Health benefit contributions.
• Retirement plans with match.
• Flexible spending accounts.

Company Description

Skill connects the best professional, IT, engineering, financial and administrative talent with the world's biggest brands. Our eligible talent get access to benefits such as health benefit contributions, retirement plans with match and flexible spending accounts.

Skill is an equal-opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics. We're about creating an inclusive environment—one where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are valued, and everyone can contribute, grow their careers, and thrive.