Lead, Software Engineer

Journey with us! Combine your career goals and sense of adventure by joining our exciting team of employees. Royal Caribbean Group is pleased to offer a competitive compensation and benefits package, and excellent career development opportunities, each offering unique ways to explore the world.

We are proud to be the vacation-industry leader with global brands — including Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Silversea Cruises — the most innovative fleet and private destinations, and the best people. Together, we are dedicated to turning the vacation of a lifetime into a lifetime of vacations for our guests.

The Royal Caribbean Group’s IT Shipboard Team has an exciting career opportunity for a full time Lead Software Engineer reporting to the Director, Shipboard Engineering.

The position is onsite and based in Miramar, Florida. 

The position is also not eligible for work authorization sponsorship.

Position Summary

The Lead Software Engineer provides technical leadership across the Shipboard Engineering portfolio, setting technical direction and driving architecture decisions for fleetwide systems. This role mentors engineers across multiple product teams, owns complex deliverables hands-on, and partners closely with product, infrastructure, network, vendor, and shipboard teams to deliver and operate robust platforms. The Lead Software Engineer is a senior individual contributor who designs and builds foundational platforms, unblocks teams, and ensures solutions meet Royal Caribbean Group standards.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Owns end-to-end design and delivery of cross-service initiatives spanning backend, domain-service, and shipboard-data layers.
• Architects and leads implementation of reactive Spring Boot 3 / WebFlux services backed by MariaDB (R2DBC) and Couchbase, plus Next.js 14 / React Query frontends in TypeScript.
• Drives engineering standards across multiple repositories, including TDD, code review depth, observability, performance budgets, and error-handling patterns.
• Leads through code, pairing with engineers on critical paths, unblocking cross-team integration questions, and writing reference implementations.
• Makes platform-shaping decisions on caching, inter-service contracts, schema evolution, and ship-shore synchronization patterns.
• Mentors senior, mid, and junior engineers, driving performance reviews and growth conversations in partnership with the Engineering Manager.
• Owns production reliability across products, leading postmortems and implementing pattern-fixes to prevent recurrence.
• Partners with Enterprise Architecture, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Network, and Product teams to ensure solutions meet RCG standards.
• Leads deployment and cutover for major releases, including fleetwide rollouts, ship conversions, and pilot deployments.
• Builds runbooks and drives improvements to deployment automation, observability (Splunk, OTEL), CI/CD pipelines, and platform-wide tooling.
• Represents Shipboard Engineering in cross-organizational technical forums, translating ship operational constraints into engineering decisions.

Qualifications, Knowledge and Skills

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience required.

• Minimum 8 years building production server-side and full-stack systems, with at least 2 years in a Lead or Staff individual contributor capacity.
• Deep expertise in Java 17+ and the Spring Boot 3 ecosystem (WebFlux, R2DBC, Spring Security, Spring Cloud); Kotlin a plus.
• Strong reactive programming background (Project Reactor, backpressure, error-handling, schedulers).
• Hands-on experience with Next.js (App Router), React (including React Query v5), TypeScript, Tailwind, Jest.
• Production experience with at least one relational database (MariaDB / MySQL / Postgres) and one document store (Couchbase / MongoDB).
• Experience with Kubernetes / OpenShift, Helm, and ArgoCD for fleetwide deployment patterns.
• OAuth 2.0 / OIDC integration (ForgeRock or equivalent), including JWT/JWKS, claim-based authorization, and SSO flows.
• Build tooling fluency: Gradle, Maven, npm, lint-staged / pre-commit hooks.
• Observability stack: Splunk, OpenTelemetry, structured logging, distributed tracing.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to author RFCs, ADRs, and runbooks.
• Experience leading remote and nearshore engineering teams is a strong plus.
• Cruise, hospitality, or shipboard systems experience is a plus, not required.

• Advanced proficiency in distributed-systems concepts: consistency, isolation, idempotency, retries, backpressure, circuit breakers.
• Strong data-structures and algorithms background, with practical judgment on optimization.
• Sets and enforces engineering standards (TDD, code review, branch hygiene, semantic versioning, commitlint conventions).
• Designs services and platforms for multi-year evolution: feature flags, contract-first APIs, schema migration discipline, sunset plans.
• Fluent in domain-driven design, ports-and-adapters, and event-driven patterns.
• Understands offline-first and intermittent-connectivity tradeoffs (ship-shore sync, conflict resolution, store-and-forward queues).
• Drives TDD across teams, builds test infrastructure, and ensures robust application testing and automation.
• Owns on-call rotation, diagnoses production issues, and builds dashboards and alerting for proactive operations.
• Models systematic debugging, partners with shipboard IT and shoreside ops during incident response, and translates ambiguous reports into reproducible scenarios.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineering talent at all levels.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with a focus on cross-functional teamwork.
• Commitment to fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Agency and Third-Party Submissions: Please note this is a direct search by the Company, and applications through agencies and other third parties will not be accepted, nor will fees be paid for unsolicited resumes. Any unsolicited resumes will be considered the Company's property.

We know there's a lot to consider. As you go through the application process, our recruiters will be glad to provide guidance, and more relevant details to answer any additional questions. Thank you again for your interest in Royal Caribbean Group. We'll hope to see you onboard soon!

It is the policy of the Company to ensure equal employment and promotion opportunity to qualified candidates without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, sexuality, gender identity or expression, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Royal Caribbean Group and each of its subsidiaries prohibit and will not tolerate discrimination or harassment.