What Does A Java Technical Lead Do?

WHAT DOES A JAVA TECHNICAL LEAD DO?

Published: Nov 18, 2025 - The Java Technical Lead oversees technical delivery and guides Agile teams in the development and implementation of business solutions aligned with architectural standards and cloud strategy. This role involves analyzing existing systems, recommending improvements, reviewing designs, and collaborating with stakeholders to ensure scalable, efficient, and secure applications. The lead also mentors team members, identifies skill gaps, promotes best practices, and drives continuous improvement across the development lifecycle and technical community.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Java Technical Lead

1. Java Technical Lead Job Description

Microservices Architecture: Establish and implement patterns and best practices for microservices.
Spring Boot Templates: Create Spring Boot–based microservices templates to be consumed by product engineering teams.
Design Patterns: Collaborate with product engineering teams to identify and implement common design patterns.
Pattern Evangelism: Evangelize patterns and templates across product engineering teams and drive adoption across teams.
Technology Trends: Identify evolving technology trends in microservices and continuously adapt existing patterns and best practices.
DevOps Practices: Instill DevOps best practices in these patterns and templates.
Technical Guidance: Provide technical guidance to engineers.
Developer Mentoring: Responsible for coaching and mentoring developers.
Technology Evaluation: Evaluate technology products and actively provide recommendations.

2. Java Technical Lead Functions

Agile Leadership: Lead an agile team that will design, build, and maintain efficient, reusable, and reliable code.
Coding Standards: Implement designs following coding standards and industry best practices, maintain and support mission-critical applications.
Servant Leadership: Responsible for being a servant leader for the team.
Team Development: Assist with interviewing, onboarding, and training engineers as they join the team.
Technical Guidance: Provide technical implementation guidance on the stack and participate in code reviews.
Requirements Analysis: Ensure business and requirements artifacts are created that effectively model the customer's requirements.
Design Modeling: Use tooling and best practices to create design models from requirements.
Project Documentation: Complete project documentation, including logging status, risk, progress, and effort on assigned work.

3. Java Technical Lead Roles

Java EE Development: Design and develop applications using Java EE platforms.
Web Application Development: Build web applications using Java/J2EE technologies, including JDBC, Hibernate, Spring, JMS and JSON.
OOAD Patterns: Responsible for object-oriented analysis and design using common design patterns.
Core Java Expertise: Understand Java 1.6–1.8 core APIs, including collections, multi-threading, XML, and middleware technologies.
Architecture Tradeoffs: Help the team with design and architectural tradeoffs.
Code Quality: Help with design and code reviews, as well as setting up a strong quality and delivery pipeline.
Product Architecture: Understand and implement the architecture, standards, and design of key product initiatives with minimum supervision.
Architectural Input: Provide architectural input on new and existing solutions.

4. Java Technical Lead Tasks

Full-Stack Development: Analyse, code, design, implement, test, problem analysis and resolution, and technical documentation.
Architecture Optimization: Identify inconsistencies in architecture and determine simpler and optimal programming solutions.
Component Design: Create a design for small components and participate and contribute to research projects.
Performance Engineering: Creatively define load tests, troubleshoot performance, and build scalable solutions, able to suggest DB structure normalization changes.
Technical Requirements: Understand technical requirements and how they relate and have familiarity with general performance practices like caching, query optimization, memory utilization, and clean-up, etc.
Project Ownership: Responsible for knowing aspects of the project and can jump into support, produces consistently solid project work, and is highly valued by the project team.
Team Skills Development: Participate in training, Advanced Technology Group opportunities to improve team skills and articulate issues and ideas.
Task Management: Participate in the stand-up and handling tasks workflow.

5. Java Technical Lead Details and Accountabilities

System Design: Work closely with product architects and design scalable and secure systems.
Code Architecture: Define code architecture with respect to classes, methods and APIs.
Task Definition: Define technical tasks and user stories.
Design Patterns: Responsible for defining design patterns.
Pseudo Code: Prepare pseudo code for developers.
Code Review: Review pull requests and merge code changes.
Reusable Assets: Contribute reusable assets (coding standards, shared libraries).
Best Practices: Continuously innovate on industry best practices and design patterns.
Root Cause Analysis: Lead troubleshooting, perform root cause analysis.

6. Java Technical Lead Overview

Software Development: Design, analyze, develop, review, test, debug, deliver and support software and/or new products.
Team Mentoring: Coach and mentor members of the team.
Agile DevOps Practices: Understand the importance of end-to-end software development, which may include working in Agile frameworks and DevOps Practices.
Strategic Direction: Help set strategic direction for the team.
Talent Acquisition: Responsible for talent acquisition.
Relationship Building: Cultivate trust through personal and team relationships with a range of Product Owners.
Performance Coaching: Mentor and develop to a high level of performance.
Knowledge Sharing: Share tacit knowledge gained from experience.
Architectural Alignment: Engage with technology and business leadership to evolve architectural principles and ensure alignment with technology solutions with these principles.

7. Java Technical Lead Duties

Technical Expertise: Serve as a technical expert on development projects.
Team Leadership: Responsible for leading a team of developers.
Technical Specifications: Write technical specs based on the conceptual design and the vision of the customer.
Design Development: Develop high-quality and detailed designs.
Java JavaScript Development: Use Java and JavaScript programming languages and related development technologies.
Code Analysis: Analyze code to find causes of errors and revise programs.
User Consultation: Consult with the end-user to prototype, refine, test, and debug programs to meet needs.
Independent Judgment: Work under minimal supervision, with wide latitude for independent judgment.

8. Java Technical Lead Details

Project Lifecycle Oversight: Responsible for overseeing the entire Project Lifecycle.
Requirements Understanding: Understand the Customer’s Requirements along with the Project Team.
Solution Development: Responsible for solution development.
User Story Definition: Responsible for participating in the User Story Definition.
PRD Oversight: Responsible for overseeing PRDs.
Development Governance: Oversee development, including setting up guidelines for development.
Code Review Leadership: Handle code reviews, supporting members of the team with mentoring, pairing, code reviewing and driving the adoption of best practices.
Performance Issue Resolution: Report and fix performance issues during code or design reviews.
Development Standards: Define all aspects of development, from appropriate technology and workflow to Coding standards.
Team Coaching: Build, develop, mentor and coach team members and help them in their technical growth.

9. Java Technical Lead Roles and Responsibilities

Customer Solutioning: Solve for the customer, understand the WHY and enrich the specification to create a solution that delights customers.
System Design Leadership: Lead the design and development of significant parts of the system.
Code Development: Create efficient, reusable, and reliable code and set an example of good development practices.
Code Quality Stewardship: Responsible for being a steward of code quality, agile development processes and automation.
Development Example: Lead by example through good development practices.
Application Performance: Ensure the best possible performance, quality, and responsiveness of the applications.
Issue Resolution: Identify bottlenecks and bugs, and devise solutions to these problems.
Production Support: Promptly resolve production issues based on priority, with a focus on unblocking the customer and ensuring problems do not recur.
Effort Estimation: Provide the level of effort (LOE) and Estimates.
Schedule Planning: Work with technical project managers and product management teams to define the schedule.
Status Reporting: Responsible for providing status reports.
Release Management: Define and drive release management planning.
Technology Evaluation: Investigate, analyze, and evaluate new technologies.
Technical Influence: Influence senior management in setting the organization’s technical objectives.
Practice Evolution: Keep abreast of new developments to help define the necessary changes to practice.

10. Java Technical Lead Duties and Roles

Agile Team Leadership: Lead the design, development and maintenance work on an agile scrum team focused on delivering non-traditional air content to agency applications.
Task Delegation: Delegate tasks and achieve daily, weekly, and monthly goals.
Stakeholder Liaison: Liaise with team members, management, and customers to ensure projects are completed to standard.
Risk Management: Identify risks and form contingency plans as soon.
Team Transparency: Responsible for being transparent with the team about challenges, failures, and successes.
Technical Review: Lead technical design and code reviews for the team to ensure the quality of deliverables.
Java Microservices Development: Develop Java-based APIs and micro services.
Technology Insight: Work with the director to gain an understanding of long-term technology impacts.
Strategic Alignment: Ensure development resources are developing in alignment with the company's strategic vision.

11. Java Technical Lead Responsibilities and Key Tasks

Feature Refinement: Participate in feature and story refinement and research and analyze the impact of new capabilities.
Iteration Completion: Ensure the successful completion of stories during each iteration to achieve Program Increment Objectives.
Team Velocity: Drive team velocity by working closely with the team.
Resource Alignment: Motivate, guide and align all resources, ensuring functional development work and maintenance and support activities are completed in adherence to Travelport technology standards.
Java Best Practices: Educate all development resources on Java best practices, performance-minded development, and Travelport standards.
Status Tracking: Ensure team is updating status in corporate tools, eg, Jira, MS Teams, Confluence, etc.
System Improvement: Generate ideas to improve overall system design and/or streamline the CI/CD pipeline to generate efficiencies in system flow.
Production Support: Participate in supporting the availability and stability of applications in production.

12. Java Technical Lead Additional Details

Delivery Leadership: Lead delivery teams that develop new custom applications or enhance existing applications, and provide system integration services, all in the trouble management domain.
Coding Standards: Enforce coding standards and best practices.
Project Estimation: Assist the Project Manager in the planning and estimation of project deliverables.
Activity Coordination: Plan, direct and coordinate daily activities with the development team members.
Technical Design Leadership: Responsible for leading technical design.
Development Supervision: Supervise the progress of development activities.
Code Review: Responsible for performing code reviews.
Technical Troubleshooting: Support the team in troubleshooting technical issues.
Deadline Support: Assist the project manager with adhering to project deadlines and schedules.

13. Java Technical Lead Essential Functions

Agile Delivery: Deliver new working solutions for their project in an Agile environment.
Self Learning: Learn on my own and work well in a team environment.
Technology Leadership: Serve as technology lead for a team of technologists, developers and/or analysts.
Product Development: Architect, design, develop, document, and test new technical products for market sale or internal use.
Technical Expertise: Responsible for being the go-to technical expert for pod team members.
Technology Awareness: Stay current regarding technology trends and look ahead to bring “newness” to Charge.
Guild Participation: Participate in technology-related guilds and solution/architecture reviews for other pods.
Technical Specifications: Write technical specs based on the conceptual design and the vision of the customer.
Software Development: Design, develop, document, test, and debug new and existing software systems and/or applications for market sale or large-scale proprietary software for internal use.
Lifecycle Participation: Participate in the full development life cycle, including requirements analysis and design.
Business Specifications: Write technical specifications based on the conceptual design and stated business requirements.
Complex Work Execution: Conduct complex work important to the organization.

14. Java Technical Lead Role Purpose

Microservices Development: Design and develop enterprise-grade event-driven Microservices with Spring Boot and Kafka (Meet all requirements on scalability, availability, reliability, security, performance, operational excellence and cost effectiveness).
Cloud Deployment: Develop and deploy Microservices applications on Cloud infrastructure, AWS.
AWS Integration: Integrate Microservices applications with managed AWS services.
Agile Team Leadership: Lead team of engineers working on a collaborative Agile POD to deliver software on an ongoing basis.
Requirements Understanding: Work closely with business analysts, architects and other stakeholders to fully understand functional/technical requirements, provide feedback, and request clarification.
Code Review: Conduct a code review to make sure that all codes are developed as per the standards and the implementation complies with the overall architecture.
Documentation Maintenance: Maintain all project documentation up to date with the implementation.
Work Estimation: Make sure all work items are accurately estimated and planned for development.

15. Senior Java Technical Lead General Responsibilities

Banking IT Contribution: Contribute to IT projects in the banking industry for Antaes clients.
Team Management: Manage the application designs, the developers’ follow-up and motivate the team with best practices in the development area.
Specification Evaluation: Study, evaluate and provide feedback on functional specifications.
Development Estimation: Provide a detailed estimation for the development of solutions.
Technical Standards: Take care of the technical documentation, quality and standards.
Nonfunctional Testing: Supervise and contribute to the non-functional testing.
Design Code Review: Perform design and code review for other team members.
Team Mentoring: Mentor junior team members.
Design Documentation: Prepare documentation for design and implementation.
Level Three Support: Perform level 3 Support of applications in production, analyze and resolve issues as they arise.
Service Promotion: Contribute to the promotion of Antaes' services on top of the assistance provided to the client.

16. Java Technical Lead Tasks

Technical Consultation: Consult with the wider IT community to provide technical and/or domain advice and expertise.
Solution Quality: Improve the quality and robustness of solutions and maintain/support application systems and/or development.
Standards Governance: Set direction and oversight for the consistent use and application of tools, standards, methods, and processes.
Code Quality Assurance: Ensure that quality applications are developed with consistent, maintainable code that supports risk and compliance management.
Architecture Input: Apply expertise knowledge of systems to inform Architecture and Solutions Design on optimal designs.
Solution Delivery: Ensure high-quality solutions are delivered to the business.
Design Costing: Deliver cost estimates for the design and development phase in partnership with the architect, business analysts, project management, subject matter experts and solution providers for projects.
Effort Estimation: Provide accurate and timely cost estimates.
Lifecycle Expertise: Provide subject matter expertise and advice regarding application asset lifecycle management, contribution to end-to-end incident recovery, problem resolution, service continuity management and asset integration points within the bank.

17. Java Technical Lead General Responsibilities

Issue Diagnosis: Lead the diagnosis and resolution of complex service (cross infrastructure/application) issues that may arise during the application/development life cycle.
Application Support: Ensure effective development, maintenance, and support of applications.
Change Validation: Provide oversight and validation of proposed complex changes to business services to ensure ongoing stability and sustainability.
Process Compliance: Ensure that agreed standards and processes within Westpac are adhered to ensure fulfilment of regulatory obligations.
Solution Tracking: Track solutions through all phases and escalate issues to maintain effective governance, reporting and control.
Technical Expertise: Provide high-level technical expertise to business/technology stakeholders to support relevant suppliers and other business stakeholders.
Team Collaboration: Contribute to the common “one team” mindset that includes collaboration and a sense of joint responsibility between Westpac teams and suppliers.
Industry Awareness: Maintain focus on industry and technical trends to allow evaluation and recommendation of changes to the business strategy/architecture and application development and maintenance within all application domains.

18. Java Technical Lead Job Summary

Agile Guidance: Guide Agile team development efforts towards successful project delivery.
Technical Delivery Ownership: Own the overall technical delivery and implementation of business solutions that are developed by the team.
System Analysis: Analyze existing systems against IT and business strategies.
Architecture Improvement: Make well-defined recommendations and execution plans for efficiency and architecture/design improvements aligned with cloud strategy, team roadmap and target state architecture.
Design Review: Review technical designs of systems, ensuring adherence to standardized proven design patterns and industry best practices.
Optimization Identification: Actively seek optimization opportunities aligned with the environment, technology stack, and product selection framework.
Solution Research: Research and evaluate alternative solutions and develop recommendations to meet business needs.
Technical Leadership: Provide technical leadership to teammates by mentoring on standards, product vision, new technologies, design techniques, development best practices, security controls, etc.
Skill Gap Analysis: Identify team skill gaps and recommend training and growth opportunities for team members.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with team members, technical resources, and business stakeholders to plan, design, develop, test, and maintain business applications.
CoP Leadership: Provide leadership and technical guidance in the developer CoP, planning, prioritization, and Agile ceremonies.
Software Quality: Maintain high standards of software quality within the team and across the department.
Best Practices Alignment: Work with other team leads, managers, and technical resources in the establishment of best practices that align with core values.

19. Java Technical Lead Accountabilities

Java Spring Leadership: Lead the team implementing core Java/Spring code to support Enterprise Applications and Services.
Requirements Understanding: Understand functional requirements, contribute to the design and architecture of the project.
Design Process Knowledge: Understand the Software design/architecture process.
Technical Lead Role: Act in a technical lead capacity, mentoring team members and applying technical expertise to challenging programming and design problems.
Technology Analysis: Analyze current technologies used within the company and determine ways to improve.
Team Mentoring: Responsible for leading a team and mentoring team members.
Enterprise Software Development: Responsible for designing and developing complex, high-performance enterprise software using Java/J2EE technologies.
Requirements Documentation: Document and monitor the requirements needed to institute proposed updates.
IT Collaboration: Work closely with Information Technology professionals within the company to ensure hardware is available for projects and is working properly.

20. Java Technical Lead Functions

Framework Establishment: Propose and establish a framework for necessary contributions from various departments.
Challenge Assessment: Account for possible project challenges on constraints, including risks, time, resources and scope.
Progress Monitoring: Work closely with project management teams to successfully monitor the progress of initiatives.
Sprint Participation: Participate in sprint planning, retrospectives and other key ceremonies.
Backlog Collaboration: Work closely and collaborate with onshore and offshore scrum team members to ensure a prioritized and sufficient product backlog for the teams to work against.
Process Improvement: Along with the scrum team, identify, monitor and implement key agreed-upon improvements.
Quality Practices: Adopt development practices that focus on quality and value, while increasing efficiency and minimizing waste.
Team Environment: Foster an environment where communication, teamwork, and innovation are encouraged.
Agile Practices: Help to implement Agile engineering best practices such as continuous integration, automation of testing and delivery, and continuous peer review within teams.

21. Java Technical Lead Duties

Solution Design: Work with the architect group for solutions that articulate the business context, conceptual design and component-level logical design.
Architecture Compliance: Ensure development is in compliance with an overall architecture vision for the platform and ensures specific components are appropriately designed and leveraged.
Platform Architecture Understanding: Understand the construction of platform architecture components.
Design Participation: Participate in design activities and own the development of the work assigned.
Issue Resolution: Work closely with the QA and integration team to resolve issues.
Roadmap Alignment: Understand the technology roadmap and deliver cost-effectiveness, business value, and competitiveness.
Continuous Learning: Responsible for learning is a top priority.
Growth Enablement: Actively structure teams and projects to maximize individual growth and opportunities.
Open Communication: Communicate openly and share opinions irrespective of role or designation.

22. Java Technical Lead Key Accountabilities

Java Team Leadership: Lead a team of 5-6 Java developers delivering consistent results.
Daily Delivery: Responsible for delivering functionality daily.
Code Quality: Ensure quality and maintainability of code.
Priority Alignment: Align with leadership on priorities, architecture, and high-level design.
Design Support: Work with team members on low-level design and help with implementation.
Production Troubleshooting: Help troubleshoot production issues.
Entrepreneur Mindset: Self-directed with a start-up/entrepreneur mindset.
Modular Software Development: Design, develop, code, unit test, integration test, data test, and debug advanced-level modular software applications and frameworks for products and customer delivery engagements.
Agile Collaboration: Lead and collaborate in an Agile team with fellow software engineers to deliver on customer requirements while exceeding customer quality requirements.
Engineering Problem Solving: Solve challenging engineering problems using leading-edge open source frameworks and AWS Cloud-based services in a diverse technology environment.

23. Java Technical Lead Responsibilities and Key Tasks

Software Enhancement: Design enhancements, updates, and programming changes for portions and subsystems of end-user application software running on local, networked, and Internet-based platforms.
Architecture Analysis: Analyze design and determine coding, programming, and integration activities required based on general objectives and knowledge of the overall architecture of the product or solution.
Test Planning: Write and execute complete testing plans, protocols, and documentation for the assigned portion of the application.
Issue Debugging: Identify and debug, and create solutions for issues with code and integration into application architecture.
Project Communication: Collaborate and communicate with management, internal, and outsourced development partners regarding software applications design status, project progress, and issue resolution.
Project Representation: Represent the software applications engineering team for all phases of larger and more complex development projects.
Staff Mentoring: Provide guidance and mentoring to less-experienced staff members.
Functional Integration: Partner with multiple management teams to ensure appropriate integration of functions to meet goals.
System Enhancement: Identify and define necessary system enhancements to deploy new products and process improvements.
Risk Assessment: Appropriately assess risk when business decisions are made, demonstrating particular consideration for the firm's reputation and safeguarding Citigroup, its clients and assets, by driving compliance with applicable laws, rules and regulations, adhering to policy, applying sound ethical judgment regarding personal behavior, conduct and business practices, and escalating, managing and reporting control issues with transparency.

24. Java Technical Lead Details

Legacy Code Analysis: Analyze legacy code in order to support the team in understanding difficult logic.
Effort Estimation: Estimate development effort, to decide/clarify with the Swiss team the appropriate way to migrate the logic.
Team Management: Manage a team of developers.
Framework Guidance: Support the team in using in-house frameworks correctly and ensure it by doing code review.
Framework Development: Develop frameworks, code base.
Architecture Collaboration: Collaborate with Swiss architects to troubleshoot and resolve framework issues.
Environment Maintenance: Maintain and resolve project environment issues, the legacy environment on Linux virtual machine, Jenkins, and OpenShift.
Customer Experience Contribution: Contribute heavily to the experience of customers accessing products.
Product Release Collaboration: Work with highly skilled engineers to release great products across Babylon Health.
Feature Evolution: Use technical insight to iteratively evolve features according to user and client needs.

25. Java Technical Lead Roles and Responsibilities

Legacy Application Analysis: Analyze legacy applications and document the technical process flow and coordinate with the client team to help in their modernization initiative.
Spring Service Development: Design and develop Java Spring-based services.
Service Testing: Write unit test, end-to-end test for the web services.
Operational Monitoring: Drive operational and production monitoring for the applications.
Discovery Leadership: Lead the discovery phase of medium to large projects to come up with a high-level design.
Test Case Development: Responsible for writing comprehensive unit and end-to-end test cases.
Architecture Collaboration: Work closely with the architecture team to bring enhancements and new products to reality.
R&D Contribution: Responsible for active member of the Research and Development team, which can enable Training, Testing and Execution of sophisticated Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence-based models in the current product stack.
Cloud Microservices Deployment: Responsible for creating, testing and deploying Microservices on the Cloud.
Enterprise Solution Design: Build and help design enterprise software solutions.
SDLC Management: Manage the software development lifecycle (SDLC), including design, testing, implementation, deployment and maintenance.

26. Java Technical Lead Duties

Software Development: Collect requirements, design, develop and test software code.
Production Support: Fix bugs and provide production support.
Task Prioritization: Prioritize across multiple tasks and manage time effectively.
Technology Learning: Learn new technologies outside his/her primary skills.
Problem Solving: Develop solutions to challenging problems.
Team Communication: Effectively communicate with team members, project managers and clients.
Feature Design Leadership: Responsible for leading the design of major new features and components of their projects, alongside taking responsibility for the deliverables of a team of 4+ Developers.
Code Quality: Write high-quality code that sets the precedent for the team, and will review their outputs.
Story Decomposition: Look at decomposing user stories into sub-tasks and collaborating with other teams to coordinate end-to-end delivery.
Agile Collaboration: Work with some of the best technical minds in this field locally, running a mature adoption of Agile with a truly progressive build pipeline moving towards automation that is ahead of the competition.

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