Java Backend Engineer with SRE & Guidewire experience in Toronto

Role: Java Backend Engineer with SRE & Guidewire experience

Location: Toronto, ON – Hybrid

Job Description:

• Automation and Reducing Toil: SREs write code and build tools to automate repetitive manual tasks (known as "toil"), aiming to spend roughly 50% of their time on software and engineering projects.
• Incident Response and Management: They act as first-line responders for critical emergencies, handle on-call rotations, troubleshoot failures, and restore service.
• SLOs, SLAs, and Error Budgets: They define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), managing "error budgets" to balance release speed with system stability.
• Monitoring and Observability: They set up logging, metrics, and alerting systems (using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or PagerDuty) to detect problems before they impact users.
• Post-Incident Reviews: They conduct root cause analysis (postmortems) to ensure failures do not repeat.
• Capacity Planning: They analyze traffic and usage patterns to forecast future infrastructure and hardware needs.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: They work alongside software developers to design resilient architectures and make applications more reliable by design.

Required Skills:

• Demonstrated experience developing software in Java or a comparable object-oriented language.
• Working knowledge of REST APIs, HTTP methods, JSON, and common API design principles.
• Familiarity with Spring Boot or another modern backend framework.
• Experience writing automated unit tests and debugging application failures.
• Familiarity with Git and pull-request-based development.
• Ability to read technical documentation, investigate unfamiliar code, and explain findings clearly.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Willingness to work collaboratively with developers, testers, analysts, and stakeholders.

Additional preferred qualifications:

• Guidewire and commercial insurance: Guidewire PolicyCenter, Gosu, Guidewire Cloud APIs, commercial property and casualty insurance, underwriting, policy administration, or workflow automation.
• API design, integration, and security: OpenAPI/Swagger, JSON Schema, Apigee or another API gateway, API Developer Portal, OAuth 2.0, JWT, mTLS, or certificate-based security.
• Event and data integration: Kafka, Schema Registry, event-driven architecture, asynchronous processing, PostgreSQL, Liquibase, or database migration tooling.
• Cloud delivery and engineering platforms: GitHub Actions, Harness, AWS, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, infrastructure as code, or comparable CI/CD and cloud technologies.
• Automated testing and partner integration: Postman, JUnit, Mockito, Playwright, or experience integrating multiple systems and external partners.