Senior Java Developer
Appex Innovation · Chicago, IL
—
Jul 21, 2026
Chicago, IL
Jul 29, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A hands-on senior backend engineering role focused on building and modernizing an enterprise notifications platform in the airline industry. Day-to-day work involves designing and coding Java/Spring Boot microservices, event-driven integrations, and cloud-native AWS solutions, alongside practical implementation of AI and GenAI capabilities such as LLM integration, RAG pipelines, and semantic search. Suits an experienced individual contributor comfortable spending the majority of their time writing, debugging, and delivering production-grade code.
Senior level · 8+ years · Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI · Contract
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 65 people in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 40–95
Applicant volume Light — Few people clear these requirements, so an application that does clear them gets looked at. Worth applying to even if you miss a nice-to-have.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $137,335 (middle half $106,829–$171,337).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The posting lists '12+ YOE' in the header but the formal Minimum Qualifications section gates on 8 years overall and 8 years Java — the overall years minimum is set to 8 to reflect the hard-gating language in the qualifications block; the 12-year figure appears only in the introductory job-details summary.
The role is explicitly Contract-W2 or FTE ('Contract-W2/FTE'); classified as Contract because the staffing/vendor framing and eligibility guidance strongly indicate a contractor engagement.
Apache Camel is listed as required but with the qualifier 'or equivalent enterprise integration frameworks' — marked required (hard gate on the capability) with no specific named alternatives since no peer tools are cited by name.
AWS services (EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, CloudFront, Lambda, EKS, ECS, API Gateway, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, AmazonMQ) are enumerated as examples under the AWS requirement; captured as a single AWS skill with Azure/GCP as cloud-equivalent alternatives per the 'or equivalent cloud services' qualifier.
Observability tools (Dynatrace, ELK Stack, CloudWatch) are listed as a group with 'or equivalent' — emitted as one skill (Dynatrace) with the others as alternatives.
AI/GenAI capabilities (LLM integration, RAG, embeddings/vector search, semantic search, classification, summarization, prompt engineering) are all required per the Minimum Qualifications section; each distinct capability is emitted as a separate skill.
Degree requirement is None because the JD explicitly accepts 'equivalent work experience' in lieu of a Bachelor's degree.
Preferred qualifications (Twilio, LLMOps/MLOps, AWS certification, notification/communication platform experience, airline domain experience) are listed under the 'What will help you propel from the pack' section and are marked preferred accordingly.
Posting is for a contract engagement — the market benchmarks below price full-time roles, so read the comp comparison with that in mind.
Read the full posting
The employer publishes the full description on their own site — read it there ↗. Or sign in to read it here — it's free, and it also lets you track this application.