WHAT DOES A LEAD JAVA DEVELOPER DO?

Published: Nov 13, 2025 - The Lead Java Developer is responsible for building a new REST-based application from the ground up, using a modern tech stack including Java 11, Docker, Kubernetes, and Vault. This role involves making architectural and technical stack decisions, ensuring zero-downtime deployments, and developing reliable, maintainable, and well-integrated services. The developer also collaborates with engineering teams, writes automated tests, and follows best practices for reusable, testable, and production-ready code.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Lead Java Developer

1. Lead Java Developer Details

  • Team Leadership: Manage the team of developers and guide them.
  • Reporting Skills: Prepare the weekly/monthly reports and share them with stakeholders.
  • Requirement Analysis: Responsible for requirement analysis and impact analysis of the changes.
  • Effort Estimation: Provide estimates for the changes.
  • Technical Documentation: Document the technical design document.
  • Code Development: Make the necessary code changes and maintain the code in the version control tool used by the client as per the coding standards.
  • Unit Testing: Carry out unit testing of the deliverables.
  • Knowledge Transfer: Prepare and conduct handover of changes to Production Support.
  • Bug Fixing: Responsible for carrying out bug fixes.
  • Deployment Support: Support live deployment and post-go-live warranty.

2. Lead Java Developer Job Summary

  • Software Development: Analyze, design and develop software solutions to meet business needs.
  • System Integration: Collaborate with internal and external technical personnel/vendors to facilitate enterprise software integration, expanding internal APIs.
  • SDLC Management: Work on different software development life cycle phases and serve as a technology resource and representative for the department.
  • Technical Documentation: Create technical documentation for software (design documents, handbooks, etc.)
  • Code Review: Perform code review and design review to ensure compliance with development standards.
  • Testing Support: Assist with developing test cases and test plans for software.
  • Requirement Review: Review software requirements documentation for projects and enhancements.
  • System Improvement: Ensure that system improvements are successfully implemented and monitored to increase efficiency.

3. Lead Java Developer Duties

  • Team Leadership: Lead team of developers.
  • Software Development: Build high-quality software components.
  • Technology Innovation: Develop groundbreaking technologies that disrupt the legacy world.
  • Code Quality: Perform code reviews and utilize Test Driven Development to ensure a consistently high quality of the codebase.
  • Subject Expertise: Become a Subject Matter Expert in products and solutions.
  • Deployment Tools: Deploy tools to package and deploy components.
  • Platform Engineering: Responsible for designing and developing platform components using Java Web Services, JWS/JAX, and component-based architectures.
  • API Development: Create and consume REST APIs, with expertise in tools, techniques and frameworks like Hibernate, event-driven architecture, and service orchestration.
  • Communication Skills: Effectively communicate issues with the client, team members, team leads and/or project management.
  • Task Management: Work independently and manage multiple task assignments.

4. Lead Java Developer Roles and Responsibilities

  • Product Implementation: Implement designs and requirements into a shippable product, write code.
  • Self-Management: Manage and self-organize to accomplish their own work.
  • Sprint Planning: Participate in sprint planning and estimation, breaking down user stories into pieces.
  • Best Practices: Use design and coding best practices to build high-quality components and solutions.
  • Software Testing: Perform unit, integration, and performance testing.
  • Code Review: Participate in peer-level code reviews.
  • Issue Resolution: Proactively identify issues and collaborate with the team to solve them.
  • Process Improvement: Follow and promote best practices.
  • Developer Mentoring: Mentor other developers and collaborate with peers.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Work with stakeholders, including the Executive, Product, Enablement, and Design teams.
  • Data Support: Assist with data-related technical issues and support their data infrastructure needs.

5. Lead Java Developer Duties and Roles

  • Scrum Collaboration: Work closely with scrum teams for assigned projects to assist in design and implementation tasks.
  • Production Support: Assist with production support issues by acting as a subject matter expert in resolving incidents and problem tickets.
  • Release Automation: Deliver automation to the current release implementation process, assisting the DevOps team.
  • PoC Participation: Participate in PoCs (Proof of Concept) and help the department with the selection of vendor solutions, technologies, methodologies and frameworks.
  • Knowledge Sharing: Conduct brownbag sessions on new and upcoming technologies, methodologies and application-appropriate frameworks.
  • Process Improvement: Actively look for opportunities to enhance standards and improve process efficiency.
  • Agile SAFe: Responsible for being an integral part of the Agile SAFe discovery and elaboration sessions.
  • Compliance Review: Perform requirements and design reviews, peer code reviews and PCI security reviews to ensure compliance with MasterCard standards.

6. Lead Java Developer Responsibilities and Key Tasks

  • Team Leadership: Lead software development teams to produce high-quality software.
  • Solution Design: Work with Product Owners and Stakeholders to define solutions and translate business requirements into technical design.
  • Quality Assurance: Champion best practices and ensure software quality.
  • Technical Roadmap: Help to define a vision and technical roadmap for Solera’s product and technology stack.
  • Solution Architecture: Take responsibility for the software solution architecture within the team.
  • Enterprise Alignment: Work closely with Enterprise Architects and implement Solera’s Architecture Manifesto.
  • DevOps Lifecycle: Own the software development lifecycle in a DevOps culture, optimize it, tackle inefficiency and reduce waste.
  • Team Mentoring: Coach and mentor team members.
  • System Reliability: Help ensure the performance, uptime and reliability of mission-critical systems.
  • Talent Acquisition: Lead the recruitment and selection of new team members.

7. Lead Java Developer Roles and Details

  • Roadmap Strategy: Develop a strategy for an integrated roadmap on the maintenance and development of the NSA platform.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with GTS and business stakeholders to implement the retail partners platform modernization roadmap.
  • Requirement Analysis: Work closely with business owners and other subject matter experts on requirements gathering and design.
  • Agile Leadership: Lead and implement Agile practices on all project/development work.
  • System Reliability: Ensure system reliability, scalability and conformance to best security practices.
  • Project Planning: Lead cross-functional and detailed project plans.
  • Software Development: Work on the development and delivery of high-quality, quality-tested code, working closely with a team of developers across multiple locations and time zones.
  • Code Review: Responsible for code review of other developers.
  • Process Automation: Drive the consolidation of tools and automation of performance results and data.
  • Operational Efficiency: Direct stakeholders to proactively identify efficiencies and resolve disconnects to maximize effectiveness.
  • QA Collaboration: Work closely with the Quality Assurance team to ensure code quality and work on the timely delivery of fixes for any defects.

8. Senior Lead Java Developer Key Accountabilities

  • Requirement Clarification: Liaise with BAs and Project Managers for clarity on development requirements.
  • Specification Analysis: Collaborate with business analysts and senior colleagues to determine the functional and technical specifications.
  • Project Estimation: Develop work breakdown structures and detailed estimates, assisting in project planning and related project artefacts.
  • Risk Management: Highlight risks and opportunities, plan mitigating actions and document them in a log.
  • Resource Coordination: Liaise closely with the Dev Manager in managing India resource utilization.
  • Solution Design: Hands-on involvement with the design of solutions.
  • Technical Review: Perform reviews of technical specifications, code and artifacts produced by the team.
  • Team Oversight: Oversight of the development team during the implementation of the solution.
  • QA Collaboration: Liaise closely with the test teams to ensure that QA processes are relevant and thorough.
  • Release Management: Work with the release teams to ensure smooth deliveries.

9. Senior Lead Java Developer Additional Details

  • Project Monitoring: Review the progress of a project according to its plan, maintaining and reporting status updates to the development manager and stakeholders.
  • Process Compliance: Ensure processes and practices are followed, documentation is complete, comprehensive and signed off, and defects are tracked and closed.
  • Test Support: Hands-on development, organize and provide support during SIT, QA and UAT test phases.
  • Technical Expertise: Provide technical expertise on Java 1.8, Spring, Spring Integration, AWS, Scala and Cloudera Hadoop.
  • Strategic Assessment: Understand the current state v/s the strategic state for the Settlements IT area.
  • Team Coordination: Work closely with the Leads as well as the Offshore teams for the implementation of the strategy.
  • Platform Consolidation: Consolidate similar functionalities across different applications into the strategic platforms and decommission the legacy ones.
  • Tech Migration: Responsible for decommissioning legacy technologies and migrating to more recent Java and cloud-based platforms.
  • Application Development: Lead the build and development of the exception manager application from the offshore team.
  • Team Management: Responsible for line managing a team of several developers.
  • Capability Building: Improve the capability of the team through coaching, mentoring and training.

10. Senior Lead Java Developer Job Description

  • Process Improvement: Follow and improve the software engineering processes.
  • Performance Reviews: Conduct appraisal rounds, writing and delivering management reviews.
  • Team Development: Organise frequent 1:1 meetings and develop personal development plans for team members.
  • Knowledge Transition: Provide KT (Knowledge Transition) to junior and new members of the team.
  • Knowledge Sharing: Coordinate with SMEs and BAs to conduct regular Knowledge Transfer (KT) to the development team and enhance the overall business skills within the group.
  • Project Coordination: Act as a point of contact within Pune for individual projects.
  • Release Management: Ensure release plans and coordinate release walkthroughs with the environment managers and RTB teams.
  • Issue Escalation: Act as an escalation point of contact for the support team, investigating and resolving issues found in production.
  • On-Call Support: Provide on-call support for releases.
  • Request Handling: Ensure requests from the RTB support team are promptly responded to.
  • Technical Resolution: Handle technical issues that are out of scope for the support staff.

11. Lead Java Developer Functions

  • Application Development: Develop a brand-new REST-based application from the ground up and develop it with reliability and observability in mind.
  • Modern Tech Stack: Work on a cutting-edge tech stack (Java 11, Docker, Kubernetes, REST, Vault).
  • Zero-Downtime Deployment: Develop applications to be released into production mid-week with a zero-downtime deployment model.
  • Technical Recommendations: Make architectural, design, and technical stack recommendations.
  • Team Collaboration: Collaborate with the other members of the engineering team.
  • Service Reliability: Ensure all services are reliable, maintainable, and well-integrated into existing platforms.
  • Best Practices: Adhere to best practices for testing and designing reusable code.
  • Automated Testing: Write automated unit, integration and end-to-end tests for each service while maintaining code coverage.

12. Lead Java Developer Essential Functions

  • Application Development: Responsible for the development of applications across the Digital and Marketing Technology domain.
  • Requirement Analysis: Understand business requirements and translate them into technical requirements.
  • Angular Development: Develop new user-facing features using the latest Angular (latest versions).
  • Responsive UI: Use visual designs (PSD files) to develop responsive web and single-page applications consuming server-side JSON RESTful services.
  • Component Reusability: Build reusable components and front-end libraries.
  • Unit Testing: Responsible for manual and automated unit testing.
  • CI/CD Support: Work on CI/CD pipelines under assistance.
  • SPA Development: Develop SPA (Single Page Applications) consuming server-side JSON RESTful services.
  • PWA Development: Develop a PWA (Progressive Web App) using Service Workers.
  • Performance Tuning: Responsible for performance tuning.
  • User Experience: Discuss with customer business groups to understand functionality and come up with innovative ideas for web development for the best user experience.
  • Technical Feasibility: Undertake project-specific Proof of Concept activities to validate technical feasibility with guidance from the Application Architect.
  • Team Collaboration: Discuss with the offshore team on tasks to be done, and mentor junior members of the team.
  • Code Review: Perform design and code reviews for team members.
  • Team Building: Train, conduct interviews and build new high-performance front-end teams.

13. Lead Java Developer Key Accountabilities

  • Platform Delivery: Ensure the Catalog platform is delivered along with the business needs while providing an in-class customer experience.
  • Development Leadership: Lead and oversee all aspects of the development process, ensuring the development activities are carried out according to the highest industry standards.
  • Agile Improvement: Work to continuously improve the agile development process, with an emphasis on automation, reuse and increased productivity.
  • System Integration: Interface with various internal and external systems and stakeholders.
  • Technical Alignment: Ensure that the technical solution is in line with the business requirements and technical standards.
  • Project Leadership: Partner with the team to support a diverse range of complex initiatives, both in development as well as production, and regularly lead multiple, technically complex, large-scale projects.
  • Team Training: Train new team members and onboard them to the catalog platform, helping create a center of excellence.
  • Java Development: Responsible for the design and development of Java-based code for a large-scale IT program.
  • SAFe Development: Operate as a lead developer on a SAFe Agile project to update, maintain and add additional functionality.

14. Lead Java Developer Roles

  • Platform Management: Responsible for developing and maintaining platforms.
  • API Development: Responsible for the creation of APIs.
  • Solution Design: Responsible for designing technical solutions for the business.
  • Application Security: Responsible for maintaining the security of group applications.
  • Application Maintenance: Responsible for maintaining group-wide applications.
  • Project Delivery: Responsible for working on a number of small/medium IT projects.
  • Application Enhancement: Develop and enhance applications that successfully meet business objectives and timelines.
  • Agile Development: Design, develop and test solutions independently and together as an agile team.
  • Team Collaboration: Collaborate with other development team members and external teams.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders for solutions.

15. Lead Java Developer Tasks

  • Module Development: Responsible for the development of specific modules or components, creation and maintenance of systems at various stages of development (from analysis to deployment to production and maintenance).
  • Technical Design: Revise business requirements in terms of technical feasibility and create designs for technical solutions.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Develop applications in close cooperation with the customer’s technical and business stakeholders.
  • Technology Adoption: Support in introducing new technologies and tools, as well as modernizing environments.
  • Quality Assurance: Cooperate with other lead developers to ensure that the quality standards of code and good software development practices are adopted in the project.
  • Work Prioritization: Organize and prioritize the work for the team in the operational/technical area and support the project leader with the work planning.
  • Team Leadership: Lead a small team to enable the design and development of custom and complex software solutions.
  • Lifecycle Management: Manage the project software delivery lifecycle and the team’s role within this process.
  • Code Quality: Produce high-quality, maintainable code.
  • Client Partnership: Partner effectively with client project teams.

16. Lead Java Developer Accountabilities

  • API Architecture: Architect, develop, and implement APIs and web applications with minimal guidance using Agile methodologies.
  • Quality Review: Perform quality review of the APIs developed and provide feedback to junior team members.
  • Agile Resource Management: Set up and manage the deployment and maintenance of the team’s Agile resources.
  • API Implementation: Implement APIs that are consumed by web applications and mobile native applications.
  • Database Development: Responsible for architecting, developing, and deploying back-end databases.
  • Team Coordination: Coordinate with onshore and offshore teams.
  • Modern Java Development: Build modern applications with JAVA, Spring, Spring Boot, Microservices and Hibernate.
  • Web Services Development: Develop Web Services REST/SOAP/WSDL/XML/SOA.
  • Continuous Deployment: Continuously integrate and deploy developed software.
  • CI/CD Enhancement: Update the CI/CD scripts to improve continuous integration practices.
  • Product Direction: Work with technical team managers to direct the development of new products and features.

17. Lead Java Developer Responsibilities

  • Software Development: Responsible for being part of the IBM Software Development team in the Mexico Software Lab, creating, developing and testing the storage solutions used in Hybrid Cloud environments to optimize AI and data.
  • Cloud Innovation: Innovate and create Hybrid Cloud Storage solutions used for AI, Big Data and Virtualization.
  • Team Contribution: Work as a key member of a best-in-class development team.
  • Skill Growth: Help to grow and develop new high technical skills in areas such as storage, operating systems, programming languages, networking, agile development processes, design thinking, etc.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Interact with performance teams, other software developers, architects, information developers and network engineers.
  • Code Development: Develop the executable code of the system components, run unit tests and integrate the code in official repositories, as well as solve code defects.
  • Java Implementation: Implement business requirements in Java across all phases of the development process.
  • Component Design: Analysis, design, implementation and testing of new components.
  • Technical Leadership: Collaborate and take a lead role (technical lead) in complex projects.
  • Component Optimization: Maintain and optimize existing components, and cooperate in the introduction of major releases.

18. Senior Lead Java Developer Details and Accountabilities

  • Requirement Analysis: Participate in requirements analysis.
  • Software Architecture: Collaborate with clients to produce software design and architecture.
  • Application Deployment: Test and deploy applications and systems, then revise, update, refactor and debug code.
  • Technical Support: Serve as an expert on applications and provide technical support.
  • Microservice Development: Work in multiple components of Supplier Management, building on a robust, easily deployable componentized microservice architecture and existing, tried and tested platform.
  • Cloud Scalability: Troubleshoot and solve complex cloud scalability issues.
  • UI Enhancement: Develop/enhance the user experience using newer technologies like AngularJS.
  • Code Review: Responsible for performing design and code reviews.
Relevant Information
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