We are hiring a Java Developer - Senior with our client in Chicago, IL for a hybrid role. Job Details: Role: Java Developer (Senior) Location: Chicago, IL - hybrid Key Areas: AI-DLC Senior Developer - Notifications Platform & AI Engineering Description - External Domain: Airlines. Experience: 12+ YOE Eligibility: USC, GC,L2S, EADs Type: Contract-W2/ FTE Summary: United's Digital Technology team designs, develops, and maintains massively scaling technology solutions brought to life with innovative architectures, data analytics, digital solutions, and practical AI-enabled capabilities. The Notifications team enables enterprise communication capabilities supporting customer and crew portfolios. This contractor role will focus on hands-on design, development, modernization, and production delivery of notification platform services, integrations, event-driven capabilities, and AI-enabled communication use cases. Key Responsibilities: The role of Senior Developer will have a technical focus on enabling Notifications at the enterprise level and supporting a robust communication platform for customer and crew portfolios. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role. This is not a management role. The expectation is to actively design, code, debug, optimize, deploy, and support production-grade solutions. • Design AND implement core services for the enterprise Notifications platform, including APIs, event-driven integrations, orchestration components, templates, and platform capabilities. • Write, review, debug, and optimize production code actively; lead through hands-on engineering contribution rather than delegation. • Build cloud-native backend services using Java, Spring Boot, Apache Camel, microservices, container technologies, and AWS services. • Develop and integrate AI/GenAI capabilities hands-on, including prompt design, LLM integration, RAG pipelines, embeddings/vector search, semantic search, classification, summarization, and AI-assisted communication workflows. • Prototype, validate, and productionize AI-enabled features while considering latency, accuracy, cost, monitoring, fallback design, and operational reliability. • Design solutions for high availability, scalability, resiliency, observability, performance, security, privacy, and compliance needs. • Support integrations with internal enterprise systems, eventing platforms, data providers, communication providers, and vendor-managed services as needed. • Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues directly, including performance bottlenecks, integration failures, data issues, and system reliability concerns. • Work closely with architects, product owners, business stakeholders, development teams, and vendor teams to convert requirements into working solutions. • Contribute to technical design, system documentation, code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, release readiness, and production support practices. • Ensure solutions are aligned with enterprise engineering standards, security expectations, and application lifecycle best practices. • Mentor developers through code-level guidance, design reviews, and engineering best practices; however, the primary expectation remains hands-on delivery. Qualifications - External What is needed to succeed (Minimum Qualifications): • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, related field, or equivalent work experience required. • Minimum 8 years of overall experience in software engineering, application development, integration, and SDLC delivery. • Strong recent hands-on software development experience; candidate must be comfortable spending majority of time coding, debugging, designing, and delivering working software. • Minimum 8 years of hands-on Java backend development experience, including Spring Boot, REST APIs, microservices, and open-source technologies. • Minimum 3 years of hands-on experience with event-driven systems, messaging, streaming, integration, or notification platform capabilities. • Hands-on experience with Apache Camel or equivalent enterprise integration frameworks. • Minimum 4 years of hands-on experience with AWS or equivalent cloud services such as EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, CloudFront, Lambda, EKS, ECS, API Gateway, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, AmazonMQ, or related services. • Strong hands-on AI/GenAI implementation experience in enterprise or production-grade applications; AI experience should not be limited to strategy, vendor discussions, or conceptual understanding. • Practical experience involves personally implementing one or more AI capabilities such as LLM integration, prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings/vector search, semantic search, classification, summarization, AI-assisted workflow automation, or decision-support capabilities. • Understanding responsible AI and secure AI engineering practices, including data privacy, access control, guardrails, evaluation, monitoring, hallucination risk, human review where needed, and auditability. • Experience with observability and analytics tools such as Dynatrace, ELK Stack, CloudWatch, or equivalent tools. • Experience working in agile delivery environments where CI/CD, automated testing, code quality, deployment readiness, and production support are critical. • Demonstrated knowledge of software engineering best practices such as version control, software packaging, release management, automated testing, secure coding, and operational readiness. • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with ability to diagnose complex technical issues independently. • Must be self-motivated, collaborative, and able to communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders. What will help you propel from the pack (Preferred Qualifications): • Experience designing and developing enterprise notification, communication, customer messaging, content management, or eventing platform solutions. • Experience with Twilio or similar communication/messaging platforms. • Experience applying AI to communication use cases such as personalization, routing, prioritization, content quality checks, template assistance, intent classification, summarization, or operational anomaly detection. • Experience with AI observability, LLMOps/MLOps practices, model/prompt evaluation, AI guardrails, and production monitoring of AI-enabled features. • AWS certification or equivalent cloud certification. • Experience in high-scale, 24x7 production environments. • Airline, travel, customer platforms, or crew operations domain experience. Candidate Profile Guidance for Vendors: • Submit candidates with strong hands-on individual contributor experience, not primarily people management profiles. • Candidate should show recent coding and production delivery experience in Java/backend/cloud systems. • Candidate should have real implementation experience in AI/GenAI capabilities, not only AI awareness, training, governance, or tool evaluation experience. • Profiles that are architecture-only, governance-heavy, or delivery-management focused without recent hands-on coding will not be a fit. Role Type: • Senior hands-on individual contributor role within the Notifications platform team. • Primary focus is hands-on engineering delivery, production support, and AI-enabled platform implementation.