Principal JAVA Full Stack Software Engineer

MetLife - Bridgewater Township, NJ

Full-time - Principal

Bridgewater Township, NJ

Insurance Carriers and Related Activities

About the position

As a Principal Full Stack Engineer for the Small Business Solutions (SBS) Platform at MetLife, you will lead the technical design and development of cross-functional applications that address complex business challenges. This hands-on role involves creating innovative solutions, modernizing existing systems, and supporting the growth of the product portfolio. You will collaborate with multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and engage with senior leaders and IT partners throughout the Agile lifecycle, focusing on solution design, development, debugging, security assessment, and performance tuning.

Responsibilities

• Develop modern enterprise-level applications for the US Group Business in the cloud and on-prem.
• Lead & mentor the technical design, development, and integration of solutions using existing and emerging technology platforms.
• Influence and coach the broader technical team to help push best practices and understanding of modern design and development practices.
• Define technology standards, guidelines, and coding practices for the SBS platform.
• Create architectures for large-scale web-based applications and technology solutions, by collaborating with other architects/technical leads.
• Become a subject matter expert and gain a deep understanding of the SBS Platform Application and Infrastructure framework.
• Work closely with project managers, architects, developers, business users/BAs, and applicable outside entities (vendors and others).
• Hands-on development with a focus on application modernization, site reliability, containerization, and building appropriate API layers in Java Spring Boot, Node.js, and other distributed technologies.
• Participate in critical production issues, driving teams towards incident & problem ticket closure.
• Participate in fit/gap analysis of requirements, help manage user expectations on feature deliverables, provide tactical and strategic options to address issues and technical debt, and develop code to modern standards.
• Work with Enterprise Architects to ensure compliance with MetLife standards.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Deep experience in software development with a strong technical understanding of designing and building enterprise-scale web-based applications both on-prem and in the Cloud.
• In-depth understanding of front-end and back-end web application development and design patterns with Java and modern web components.
• Experience in translating high-level requirements into technical solutions.
• Experience with relational (Oracle, SQL Server) and no-SQL (like MongoDB), or similar database platforms.
• Experience with containerization management technologies like Kubernetes.
• Experience working in an Agile delivery model.
• Experience in creating/managing build and deployment pipelines.
• Familiarity with instrumenting and using monitoring/alerting for large-scale complex enterprise solutions.
• Experience identifying and resolving application performance/scaling issues.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with focused attention to detail, as well as the ability to establish strong relationships across teams to deliver work and collaborate across the enterprise effectively.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience working in financial services, insurance, and/or banking.
• Knowledge of networking, security, storage, and computing features of the cloud platform.
• Knowledge of deployment strategies like Blue-Green Deployment, Canary deployments, etc.
• Experience using Microsoft Azure's suite of products, AzDo pipelines, Keyvault, ACR, AKS, Storage Accounts, Azure Functions, APIM, and EntraID.
• Technical experience with integrating on-premises solutions with cloud-based solutions.
• Hands-on Python, AI RAG, and AI prompting.
• Familiarity with scripting and commands in sh/bash/PowerShell.
• App Server experience with Tomcat, Wildfly (JBoss).
• Exposure to IBM Cloud Pak technologies - CP4i/CP4d.
• Experience with Maven, Gradle, Gulp, Artifactory.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code using tools like terraform.