Junior Backend Developer Jobs in Detroit, MI (NOW HIRING)

Senior Backend Developer – EV Charging Ecosystem

Job Description

Location: Dearborn, MI

Experience: 5–9 years

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend Developer to design and build scalable, high-availability services powering our EV charging platform. You will work on core backend systems that manage charge point communication, session lifecycle, tariffs, billing, and roaming integrations (OCPP/OCPI), using Java, Spring Boot, microservices architecture, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This role requires strong engineering fundamentals combined with an understanding of real-time, event-driven systems operating at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable backend microservices using Java and Spring Boot.
• Build and evolve services supporting core EV charging workflows — charge session management, station status/availability, billing/tariff calculation, and CDR processing.
• Architect microservices with clear domain boundaries, well-defined APIs, and resilient inter-service communication (REST, gRPC, or messaging queues).
• Design and implement event-driven architectures using tools like Pub/Sub, Kafka, or similar for real-time data flows (e.g., charger telemetry, session updates).
• Deploy, manage, and optimize services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, etc.
• Collaborate with Business Analysts and Product Managers to translate integration requirements (OCPP/OCPI, CPO/eMSP data flows) into technical designs.
• Ensure high availability and low-latency handling of real-time charger communication and transactional data.
• Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code following best practices (unit/integration testing, code reviews, CI/CD).
• Implement observability — logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting — using tools like Cloud Monitoring, Prometheus, Grafana, or Stackdriver.
• Design and manage relational/NoSQL data models (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Firestore, BigQuery) to support high-throughput transactional workloads.
• Participate in architecture reviews, capacity planning, and performance tuning for services handling high concurrent charger/session loads.
• Mentor junior developers, contribute to coding standards, and drive engineering best practices across the team.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues, including protocol-level (OCPP/OCPI) integration failures, with a strong sense of ownership.

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong hands-on experience with Java (8/11/17+) and the Spring Boot ecosystem (Spring Data, Spring Security, Spring Cloud).
• Proven experience designing and building microservices architectures — service decomposition, API design (REST/gRPC), inter-service communication, and resilience patterns (circuit breakers, retries, timeouts).
• Solid experience deploying and operating applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — GKE/Kubernetes, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, IAM, load balancing.
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Strong understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and experience with query optimization and schema design.
• Experience with message queues/event streaming (Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ) for asynchronous and real-time processing.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (Cloud Build, Jenkins, GitHub Actions) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform preferred).
• Solid grasp of API security, authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT), and secure service-to-service communication.
• Experience writing unit, integration, and contract tests; comfort with TDD/BDD practices.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts — consistency, idempotency, fault tolerance, and scalability.
• Excellent debugging, performance tuning, and production troubleshooting skills.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have

• Prior experience in the EV charging / e-mobility domain, especially working with OCPP and OCPI protocols.
• Experience integrating with Charge Point Operators (CPOs), eMSPs, or roaming hubs (Hubject, Gireve).
• Exposure to real-time device/IoT communication protocols (WebSocket, MQTT).
• Experience with NoSQL/analytical stores (Firestore, BigQuery, Redis).
• Knowledge of payment gateway integrations and PCI-DSS-aware system design.
• Experience with GraphQL APIs.
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum practices and tools like JIRA/Confluence.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master's a plus, not mandatory).