Company Description

At Nielsen, we are passionate about our work to power a better media future for all people by providing powerful insights that drive client decisions and deliver extraordinary results. Our talented, global workforce is dedicated to capturing audience engagement with content – wherever and whenever it’s consumed. Together, we are proudly rooted in our deep legacy as we stand at the forefront of the media revolution. When you join Nielsen, you will join a dynamic team committed to excellence, perseverance, and the ambition to make an impact together. We champion you, because when you succeed, we do too. We enable your best to power our future.

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced Lead Developer to lead technical delivery for a team: hands-on coding, architecture alignment, and raising the bar on quality and operations. You will design and ship backend capabilities, partner on requirements and trade-offs, and help the team deliver reliably in production.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and review features and APIs (services, integrations, data access).

• Own reliability for services you touch: correctness, performance, observability, and safe releases.

• Work with the team on architecture for new capabilities and on improving existing systems (database schema, caching, deployment, operational runbooks).

• Partner with product and other engineering teams on requirements, estimates, and technical trade-offs.

• Review code, clarify design, and mentor engineers informally; contribute to a culture of quality and learning.

• Identify and drive process improvements: clearer contracts, better tests, CI/CD hygiene, and reduced operational toil.

• Create and maintain technical documentation where it helps onboarding and operations.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional experience shipping production backend services in Java (e.g. Spring Boot) or an equivalent JVM stack; comfortable with REST APIs, validation, auth integration (e.g. OAuth2 / JWT), and common Spring patterns.

• Data stores — solid PostgreSQL: schema design, migrations (e.g. Flyway or similar), indexing, transactions, and debugging slow queries.

• Caching — hands-on use of Redis or Valkey (or similar): cache keys, TTLs, invalidation, and failure modes when cache is down or stale.

• Build and quality — Gradle or Maven, unit/integration tests, constructive code review habits, and CI-friendly workflows.

• Containers and cloud — Docker; deploying or operating services on AWS (or similar): configs, secrets, logs, metrics.

• Observability — metrics, logs, and tracing sufficient to find regressions and latency issues in production.

• API and integration design — clear contracts, versioning or backward-compatibility discipline, and safe handling of errors and idempotency where it matters.

• Education — Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).

• Version control — strong experience with Git and collaborative branching/review practices.

Preferred skills

• Ad tech or high-QPS adjacent — experience with auctions, bidding, strict latency budgets, or very high read/write traffic.

• Rust or other systems languages — for performance-critical services or tooling.

• Kubernetes and GitOps-style deployments.

• UI collaboration — comfort reading, debugging, or occasionally contributing to our web UI built with React, TypeScript, Vite, Material UI (MUI), TanStack Query, React Router, and Tailwind CSS (pairing with UI engineers on API contracts, auth flows, and end-to-end behavior).

• Event-driven design, messaging, or stream processing.

• Infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation).

• Prior mentoring, technical leadership, or leading small initiatives.

Additional Information

Please be aware that job-seekers may be at risk of targeting by scammers seeking personal data or money. Nielsen recruiters will only contact you through official job boards, LinkedIn, or email with a nielsen.com domain. Be cautious of any outreach claiming to be from Nielsen via other messaging platforms or personal email addresses. Always verify that email communications come from an @nielsen.com address. If you’re unsure about the authenticity of a job offer or communication, please contact Nielsen directly through our official website or verified social media channels.