Disclaimer – Must read: Commitment & Focus

This role requires full-time dedication, with clear priority given to Darwoft projects during the established working hours. It is not compatible with other full-time professional engagements. Any additional professional activities must be disclosed in advance and must not interfere with the responsibilities or working hours of this role.

114L - Java Modernization Lead (JVM/Spring Boot/Maven/Gradle) · Senior/Principal · Remote · LATAM

General Information

• Location: Anywhere in LATAM

• Work Model: 100% Remote, with potential travel for key customer engagements

• Contract Type: Contractor

• Project: Enterprise Java Modernization

• Time Zone: Availability to collaborate with US-based customers and global teams

• English Level: Advanced

• Seniority: Senior / Principal

Disclaimer – Commitment & Focus

This role requires full-time dedication, with clear priority given to Darwoft projects during the established working hours.

It is not compatible with other full-time professional engagements. Any additional professional activities must be disclosed in advance and must not interfere with the responsibilities or working hours of this role.

Get to Know Darwoft

At Darwoft, we build custom software solutions and partner with international companies to create high-impact digital products.

We are a Latin American technology company with a people-first culture, strong technical standards, and a long-term partnership mindset. We work with distributed teams, complex engineering challenges, and customers where technology has a direct impact on business outcomes.

We are looking for professionals with strong technical judgment, autonomy, excellent communication skills, and the ability to build robust, scalable, and sustainable solutions.

About the Role

We are looking for a Java Modernization Lead to help large enterprise organizations evolve complex Java application portfolios safely and at scale.

This is a highly technical and hands-on role. You will lead modernization initiatives involving hundreds or thousands of repositories, applications, and microservices, working directly with customer engineering teams to define migration strategies and execute them successfully.

Your work may include Java runtime upgrades, Spring Boot modernization, dependency remediation, build-system troubleshooting, security improvements, legacy platform replacement, and the automation of repeatable source-code transformations.

You will operate as both a technical leader and an active practitioner. You will be expected to diagnose issues across source code, builds, dependencies, pipelines, artifact repositories, runtime environments, and enterprise infrastructure.

This is not a traditional backend development role focused only on delivering new product features. It requires deep knowledge of the Java ecosystem, strong modernization experience, and the ability to guide enterprise customers through technically and organizationally complex transformations.

What You’ll Be Doing

Lead Enterprise Java Modernization

• Define and execute modernization strategies across large Java application portfolios.

• Lead migrations from Java 8 or Java 11 to Java 17, Java 21, or newer supported versions.

• Modernize Spring Boot applications, frameworks, libraries, and runtime components.

• Assess legacy monoliths, distributed systems, and microservice architectures.

• Identify technical dependencies, migration risks, blockers, and sequencing constraints.

• Segment application portfolios and define pilot groups, migration waves, and rollout plans.

• Establish testing, observability, rollback, and governance practices for modernization campaigns.

• Define repeatable patterns that can be applied across hundreds or thousands of repositories.

Java, JVM, and Runtime Engineering

• Diagnose complex compilation, classpath, packaging, and runtime issues.

• Investigate incompatibilities between Java versions, frameworks, libraries, and application servers.

• Troubleshoot failures that appear after deployment despite successful compilation.

• Analyze JVM behavior, application startup failures, dependency loading, and runtime exceptions.

• Provide technical guidance on Java ecosystem evolution and long-term maintainability.

Maven, Gradle, and Dependency Management

• Troubleshoot complex Maven and Gradle builds.

• Work with multi-module projects and large enterprise dependency graphs.

• Diagnose direct and transitive dependency conflicts.

• Apply dependency constraints, exclusions, version alignment, and resolution strategies.

• Work with snapshots, releases, mirrors, internal plugins, and private artifacts.

• Integrate with artifact management platforms such as Artifactory and Nexus.

• Standardize build and dependency practices across multiple repositories.

Automated Code Transformation

• Help customers automate repeatable source-code changes across large codebases.

• Design, test, and validate deterministic transformation patterns.

• Develop or support custom OpenRewrite recipes when required.

• Diagnose edge cases involving source parsing, compilation, static analysis, and transformation accuracy.

• Establish validation criteria before automated changes are applied at scale.

• Differentiate standard automation from cases requiring custom engineering work.

Security and Delivery

• Remediate vulnerabilities in direct and transitive dependencies.

• Support security campaigns involving CVEs, OWASP risks, code quality, and outdated components.

• Define testing strategies combining unit, integration, smoke, and regression testing.

• Work with SAST platforms and quality gates while validating findings through technical evidence.

• Troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines from commit through build, testing, packaging, and deployment.

• Work with platforms such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and GitLab CI.

Customer Technical Leadership

• Work directly with enterprise engineers, architects, Platform Engineering teams, and engineering leaders.

• Translate business objectives into executable modernization plans.

• Lead technical workshops, discovery sessions, and architecture discussions.

• Explain technical risks and trade-offs to both engineering and executive audiences.

• Build customer confidence through evidence-based diagnosis and clear communication.

• Identify blockers early and recommend practical paths forward.