Positively disrupting an industry that has not seen any innovation in over 50 years, Tekion has challenged the paradigm with the first and fastest cloud-native automotive platform that includes the revolutionary Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC) for retailers, Automotive Enterprise Cloud (AEC) for manufacturers and other large automotive enterprises and Automotive Partner Cloud (APC) for technology and industry partners. Tekion connects the entire spectrum of the automotive retail ecosystem through one seamless platform. The transformative platform uses cutting-edge technology, big data, machine learning, and AI to seamlessly bring together OEMs, retailers/dealers and consumers. With its highly configurable integration and greater customer engagement capabilities, Tekion is enabling the best automotive retail experiences ever. Tekion employs close to 3,000 people across North America, Asia and Europe.
Role Overview
We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to design, build, and scale robust backend services that power complex business workflows. This role requires strong ownership, deep Java expertise, a solid grounding in hexagonal architecture, and the ability to collaborate effectively across product, QA, AI/ML, and engineering teams in a fast-moving, AI-native environment.
Key Responsibilities
• Design and build Java (Spring Boot 3.x) microservices following hexagonal architecture — clean domain logic isolated from MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and Kafka adapter implementations.
• Develop and maintain REST APIs, Kafka event consumers/producers, and domain service logic for campaign, scoring, attribution, and customer profile workflows.
• Build and manage MongoDB document schemas and PostgreSQL relational schemas for high-throughput, multi-tenant use cases.
• Implement Cosmos DB data models for event and state storage with appropriate partition key and consistency strategies.
• Take end-to-end ownership of components — from domain design and hexagonal adapter implementation through deployment and ongoing optimization.
• Integrate with Elasticsearch for campaign search, customer lookup, and full-text query workloads.
• Configure and tune Redis or Aerospike for frequency cap enforcement, scoring cache, and session state management.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across services, event pipelines, and data layers.
• Participate actively in design discussions, architecture decisions, and code reviews.
• Mentor Junior engineers and act as a role model for code quality, hexagonal design, and AI-native engineering best practices.
Skills & Qualifications
• 5+ years of backend engineering experience; Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Strong Java 21 and Spring Boot 3.x expertise; solid grasp of hexagonal architecture and clean domain modeling.
• Experience with Kafka: consumer/producer patterns, at-least-once delivery, idempotent processing, and event-driven service design.
• Hands-on MongoDB experience: document schema design, indexing, aggregation pipelines, multi-tenant isolation.
• PostgreSQL experience: schema design, query optimization, migration management.
• Familiarity with Cosmos DB or equivalent distributed key-value / document stores.
• Experience with Elasticsearch for search and analytics workloads.
• Experience with Redis or Aerospike for high-throughput caching patterns.
• Familiarity with cloud-based systems on AWS (EKS, MSK, S3).
• Strong debugging, performance tuning, and system optimization skills.
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum development practices and CI/CD pipelines.
Good to Have
• Experience with Temporal for workflow orchestration.
• Familiarity with AI-native integration patterns: MCP tool registration, scoring API contracts, LLM gateway usage.
• Working knowledge of Python for understanding AI/ML service outputs and integrating scoring results.
• Background in enterprise-scale SaaS platforms: eCommerce, supply chain, or similar.
Tekion is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, victim of violence or having a family member who is a victim of violence, the intersectionality of two or more protected categories, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.
For more information on our privacy practices, please refer to our Applicant Privacy Notice here.
Top Skills
What We Do
At Tekion, we believe that business applications don’t have to be boring. In fact, they should be simple, fun and cool! They should be as delightful to use as your favorite social or consumer application, yet powerful enough to seamlessly and efficiently run global businesses that provide unparalleled consumer experience without compromise. Founded by visionary entrepreneur and innovator Jay Vijayan, we are building the world’s best business applications on the cloud starting with the automotive retail industry. We inherently use cutting-edge technologies like big data, machine learning/AI, and human computer interaction (voice, touch, vision, sensors and IoT). We are inventing new technology along the way to overcome barriers and solve big problems, all while having a blast doing it! Our flagship product offering, Automotive Retail Cloud ™- an industry-first cloud-native retail platform, including all functionalities of a Dealer Management System (DMS) launched recently.
