What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Backend Java Engineer - Saint Paul, Minnesota position at 1 point system?
Interview- In-person
Role Overview
This is a pure backend, individual-contributor Java role on Marketplace Shopping team. The team owns the backend services powering the pre-purchase marketplace experience—product catalog and hierarchy, product processing, ranking, fulfillment options, and related services.
The team integrates Best Buy's systems primarily with the Mirakl marketplace platform. Sellers upload products into Mirakl, and this team is responsible for consuming, processing, integrating, and ultimately powering that product information for Best Buy's customer-facing experience.
Must-have:
- Java – 10 years preferred
- Spring Boot
- Microservices
- Kafka
- PostgreSQL
- System design / distributed systems
- Performance optimization
- Production-scale backend development
Kafka expectation: Strong producer/consumer development is sufficient. They do not require someone who has architected Kafka from scratch, but candidates should understand basic Kafka configuration and be able to explain their technical decisions.
What the Manager Values
The manager wants someone who is:
- A strong hands-on Java coder
- Comfortable designing backend systems
- Able to work independently
- Strong with performance and optimization
- Comfortable with ambiguous requirements
- Proactive about asking questions and identifying gaps
- Confident enough to challenge technical decisions and explain why they disagree
- Able to take ownership from design → development → delivery → production
Nice-to-Haves
- Marketplace / e-commerce / retail experience
- Mirakl experience
- Spring Cache
- GCP / BigQuery
- Large-scale production systems
- Performance tuning
- Distributed systems
- Modernization/refactoring experience