Founder built and sold Stackify, an APM that instrumented Java in production

    Hire Java developers expertly trained on AI and product thinking

    Hire dedicated Java developers from a staffing partner that has spent two decades operating on the JVM. We have placed hundreds of senior Spring Boot, microservices, and AWS engineers in the Philippines for SaaS, fintech, and enterprise teams. Every engineer on the bench is pre-vetted, full-time, and ready to start in 7 days.

    20+ yrs
    Founder-led engineering leadership
    100s
    of Java engineers hired
    7 days
    to your first hire
    OrderController.java
    @RestController
    @RequestMapping("/api/orders")
    public class OrderController {
    
      private final OrderService service;
    
      @PostMapping
      public ResponseEntity<Order> create(
        @Valid @RequestBody CreateOrder cmd) {
        return ok(service.create(cmd));
      }
    }
    Hire in 7 days
    93%+ retention

    Java teams trusted by enterprises, scale-ups, and Fortune 500s

    AMC Theatres
    Facility Ally
    Real Quantum
    PMI Rate Pro
    Lending Standard
    Insight Voice
    Stackify
    VinSolutions
    Apartment Lines
    WaitTime
    Bonfyre
    Skuid
    BetterCloud
    ProductionLink
    AMC Theatres
    Facility Ally
    Real Quantum
    PMI Rate Pro
    Lending Standard
    Insight Voice
    Stackify
    VinSolutions
    Apartment Lines
    WaitTime
    Bonfyre
    Skuid
    BetterCloud
    ProductionLink
    Matt Watson, Full Scale CEO and four-time tech founder
    Matt Watson
    Founder & CEO, Full Scale
    Previously founded VinSolutions ($150M+ exit) and Stackify
    A note from our founder

    Stackify instrumented Java applications in production for hundreds of teams

    Before Full Scale, I founded Stackify, an APM and logging platform that instrumented Java applications in production for hundreds of engineering teams. I have spent two decades around Java stacks, debugging memory leaks at 2am, profiling Spring Boot services under load, and watching what separates senior Java engineers from ones who only know how to scaffold a controller.

    The first Java developer I ever hired turned out to be in Russia. We needed Java for Linux monitoring work at Stackify, a friend recommended his dev agency, and I didn't realize until our first phone call that the engineers he had assigned us were in St. Petersburg. The year was 2012, long before the Ukraine conflict, and it was my first time working with engineers outside the US. The experience was great: the English was solid, the code held up, and we worked with that team for two years. That accident is the reason I had the confidence to keep working with global talent, and eventually to start Full Scale. I wrote up the longer version of how I avoided offshore development for years before accidentally falling into it on the blog.

    Today Full Scale is a Java development company built around senior Filipino developers and the Product Driven framework. We have hired hundreds of Java engineers in the Philippines, we test them on real architecture problems rather than syntax quizzes, and we have staffed dedicated Java development teams for fast growing SaaS companies, lenders, and enterprise platforms. If you are serious about hiring offshore Java developers who can actually build things, you are in the right place.

    4x
    Tech founder
    100s
    of Java hires shipped
    Built different

    AI-powered Java engineers, trained on Product Driven principles

    Most enterprise Java teams adopting AI are shipping more code without shipping better software. The slop volume climbs, production bugs follow, and engineers whose only skill is typing faster end up costing more in cleanup than they save in keystrokes.

    Full Scale Java developers are trained on something different: the Product Driven approach from Matt's book, combined with the full modern AI toolkit (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor). They think first, type second, and use AI for the parts where judgment doesn't add value. That combination is rare, and it is what enterprise Java teams should actually be hiring for in 2026. When the Java team needs a custom ML model rather than a service layer, you can also hire machine learning engineers from the same bench.

    Pillar 1

    Product Driven engineering

    Our engineers are trained on the five pillars from Matt's book: Vision, Focus, Clarity, Ownership, and Courage. The result is developers who push back on bad product decisions, ask whether a ticket should exist before writing it, and own the outcome of what ships. They are not order takers.

    Read Product Driven, the book
    Pillar 2

    AI as a thinking partner

    Every Java engineer on our bench works with GitHub Copilot, Claude, and Cursor every day. They use AI to explore options, scaffold the boring parts, generate test suites, and review their own pull requests before a human ever sees them. Judgment stays with the engineer, the grunt work moves to the machine.

    AI without product thinking is just a slop machine, and the Java engineers I want on my team don't get caught by that. They reason about the system before they reach for Copilot, and they use AI for the parts where judgment doesn't matter. That's who we hire and train at Full Scale.

    Matt Watson, Founder & CEO, Full Scale
    Featured client

    How Full Scale runs dedicated teams for AMC Theatres

    AMC Theatres case study video
    AMC Theatres
    Fortune 500 client
    Industry
    Media & Entertainment
    Engagement
    Dedicated team
    Footprint
    900+ theatres worldwide
    Scope
    Enterprise systems

    Full Scale built and ran a dedicated engineering team that operates as a real extension of AMC's product organization. The same model we run for Java clients.

    Pricing

    Dedicated Java developers, starting at $35 an hour

    That rate covers a senior Java engineer in the Philippines working full-time on your project, with payroll, benefits, HR, and equipment all handled by Full Scale. The same role hired locally in the US costs $150K to $195K a year, and that math is what drives most of our clients to call.

    Starting at
    $35/ hour
    Per dedicated Java developer, fully loaded
    Compared to US based hires
    Roughly 40-50% of an equivalent US hire

    Final rate depends on seniority and skill specialty.

    What you get for that rate
    • Full-time, dedicated Java engineer
    • Pre-vetted by senior Java reviewers
    • Works your hours, your tools, your codebase
    • Payroll, HR, equipment, benefits handled by us
    • US-based account manager you can escalate to
    • 30-day replacement guarantee if it isn't a fit
    Trusted operator

    Full Scale has made the Inc. 5000 four years in a row and is Great Place to Work certified. We have been doing this since 2018, and pricing isn't the only reason clients stay with our Java development company, it's the easiest reason to call.

    Why the Philippines

    The reason offshore Java works here

    You can also hire dedicated developers in the Philippines across every other stack we staff, with the same vetting bar, retention numbers, and engagement model that Java clients get.

    English-fluent by default

    The Philippines is the third-largest English-speaking country in the world. Standups, code reviews, and customer calls work the way they do with any US team member.

    Real time-zone overlap

    Most of our Java engineers work US business hours with 4-8 hours of real-time overlap with East and West Coast teams, so decisions happen live during shared hours rather than crawling through 24-hour async handoffs.

    Deep engineering talent pool

    Cebu and Manila produce tens of thousands of CS and IT graduates a year. Java has been a staple of Philippines computer science programs for two decades, which means deep, ready talent in Spring Boot and across the broader JVM stack.

    Cultural alignment with US teams

    Filipino engineers grow up on US business norms, US TV, and US tech culture, so agile rituals, direct feedback, and collaborative workflows feel familiar from day one. These teams integrate fast rather than needing constant management.

    Why most offshore Java teams fail

    Writing Java is not the same as knowing the JVM

    Anyone who passed an Oracle certification can write Java. Building a Spring Boot system that holds up in production requires a different bench entirely. When you outsource Java development or hire offshore Java developers, this is the gap that decides whether the project ships. Here is what we test for, and what most offshore staffing companies skip. The full picture of why offshore engagements fail more often than they succeed is something I have written about at length.

    Architecture knowledge, not just syntax

    Junior developers ship features. Senior Java engineers reason about hexagonal architecture, dependency injection, CQRS, and when a pattern actually earns its complexity. We hire for that judgment.

    JPA that doesn't melt your database

    We test for the N+1 query problem, lazy loading traps, second-level cache decisions, and when to drop into JdbcTemplate or jOOQ. Bad Hibernate code is the single most common cause of Java performance issues we see in production.

    AWS beyond "deploy to EC2"

    Real cloud expertise on Java teams covers EKS, Lambda, SQS, RDS, IAM, Secrets Manager, and CloudWatch. The bench is also stocked with engineers who can read a deployment failure and know where to look in CloudWatch or X-Ray when production breaks.

    Legacy migration without the breakage

    Moving Java 8 or Java 11 to Java 21 is more than a JDK swap. We have done full Spring Boot upgrades and Java EE to Spring migrations for production systems with millions of users, which means we know where the landmines are before we start.

    Security and identity done right

    Real security work in Java covers Spring Security, OAuth2 and OIDC flows, JWT validation, OWASP basics, and secrets management. It isn't a checklist exercise, and we test for engineers who understand the actual attack surface of a production Spring Boot application.

    Production debugging skills

    A senior Java engineer should be able to read a heap dump, profile a hot path with Java Flight Recorder, and walk through a thread dump during a deadlock. Most offshore developers have never touched these tools.

    Java development services we deliver

    Hire dedicated Java developers for the work that actually matters

    Most Java hiring conversations skip past the actual project. What kind of Java work do you need done? Greenfield custom Java development, an AWS migration, a Spring Boot 3 upgrade, a performance fix that's been open for six months? As a Java development company that bills for engineering hours rather than fixed-bid projects, our developers ship across all of it. Here are the Java development services we get hired for most often.

    Custom Java application development

    Custom Java development means greenfield builds on modern Java 21 with Spring Boot 3, JPA, MapStruct, and a real domain model rather than a CRUD scaffold. The codebase survives the first 18 months without a rewrite, and your team can still reason about it on month 19.

    Read our Java development guide

    Enterprise Java development

    Enterprise Java work is multi-tenant SaaS, role-based access, audit logging, and regulatory reporting: the unglamorous stuff that enterprise software lives or dies on. Java still owns this space in fintech, lending, and large back office systems, and our bench has shipped all of it.

    Java API development & system integration

    We build REST APIs with OpenAPI contracts, gRPC for internal services, and contract testing in CI with Spring Cloud Contract. Third-party integrations get circuit breakers (Resilience4j), proper retry logic, and idempotency keys, which gives you an API layer your downstream consumers don't curse at.

    Hire experienced API developers

    Cloud-native Java on AWS, Azure, and GCP

    We build cloud-native Java on EKS, Lambda, SQS, RDS, and DynamoDB. Infrastructure is Terraform, observability is OpenTelemetry, and auth flows through IAM and Secrets Manager. That's the full cloud stack, with no "we deployed the jar to EC2" shortcuts.

    Legacy Java modernization and Spring migration

    We run production Java migration projects from Java 8 or Java 11 to Java 21 without downtime. We know which libraries break in a JDK migration, where javax.* to jakarta.* sneaks in, and how to stage a Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 cutover so business doesn't stop. This is modernization work we've done for systems with millions of users.

    Read the offshore Java development guide

    Java performance & debugging

    Our Java performance work covers Java Flight Recorder, JProfiler, async-profiler, and heap dump analysis when things get weird. These are skills most offshore Java shops have never developed, so hire us when your Spring Boot service is slow and nobody knows why.

    Hire Spring Boot developers, microservices engineers, AWS specialists

    Eight Java specializations, one staffing partner

    Most Java teams need more than one role. Hire dedicated Spring Boot developers, senior microservices engineers, AWS cloud specialists, and Java DevOps from a single vetted bench. The same bench staffs hire backend developers across Node, Python, .NET, PHP, Ruby, and Go when a project spans more than one stack. When the bottleneck on a Java team is the data layer rather than the JVM, you can also hire dedicated database developers who own PostgreSQL, MySQL, and the migration work alongside the Spring Boot engineers. Mix and match seniorities as the project requires.

    Backend Java Engineers

    Senior backend devs handle the API layer, business logic, and data access for your application. They work fluently in Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Data JPA, Hibernate, and jOOQ.

    Mid to Staff

    Full-Stack Java Developers

    End-to-end engineers pair Spring Boot on the backend with React, Angular, or Vue on the front. They ship features from the database to the UI without handoffs to a separate team.

    Mid to Senior

    Microservices & Spring Cloud Engineers

    Engineers in this specialization design distributed systems on Spring Cloud, Kafka, and event-driven architectures. They're used to working inside hexagonal or clean architecture from day one.

    Senior

    AWS / Cloud Java Engineers

    AWS-certified Java developers own EKS, Lambda, SQS, RDS, and Secrets Manager end-to-end. They write the Terraform too, and they work across Azure and GCP when projects call for it.

    Senior

    Java DevOps Engineers

    DevOps work on these teams covers CI/CD on Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab, plus containerization, infrastructure as code, and observability. They make Java releases boring in the good way.

    Mid to Senior

    Performance & Security Engineers

    When production gets weird, these are the engineers you call. They run Java Flight Recorder, JProfiler, and async-profiler investigations alongside threading audits, OWASP reviews, and Spring Security hardening.

    Senior to Staff

    Android / Kotlin Developers

    Android engineers ship native mobile builds in Java or Kotlin and maintain the legacy Java codebases that came before them. Modern stacks use Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Coroutines.

    Mid to Senior
    Hire dedicated Android developers

    Java QA & SDET

    Our automation engineers write tests in JUnit 5, Mockito, Testcontainers, REST Assured, and Selenium against Spring Boot services. They build the test pyramid you wish you had.

    Mid to Senior
    Java development services by industry

    Java expertise tuned to your industry

    As a Java development company that has been around for over a decade, we have placed dedicated Java developers into nearly every industry that runs on the JVM. Domain knowledge cuts onboarding time in half, so we match developers to projects where they have already shipped real code.

    Finance & FinTech

    Production Java in finance means strict audit trails, regulatory reporting, and zero tolerance for data anomalies. We have built and scaled Java lending platforms, mortgage tools, and payment systems for regulated US companies. Java still owns this space, and so does our bench.

    LendingPaymentsComplianceReporting
    Java development services across the full JVM stack

    From Spring Boot 3 microservices to legacy Java 8 migrations

    Whether you want to hire Spring Boot developers for a greenfield build, hire AWS Java developers for a cloud migration, or outsource Java development on a legacy Java EE system, the bench covers every layer of the JVM stack. Pick what you need. We will match a Java programmer fluent in it.

    Languages & Runtimes
    Java 21 (LTS)Java 17 (LTS)KotlinGroovyScala
    Web & API
    Spring Boot 3Spring MVCSpring WebFluxJAX-RSgRPCGraphQLWebSocket
    Data Access
    Spring Data JPAHibernatejOOQMyBatisPostgreSQLMySQLOracleMongoDBRedis
    Cloud & Infra
    AWS EKSAWS LambdaSQSRDSSecrets ManagerAzureGCPKubernetes
    DevOps & Tooling
    MavenGradleJenkinsGitHub ActionsGitLab CIDockerTerraformOpenTelemetry
    Patterns & Libraries
    Spring SecuritySpring CloudKafkaJUnit 5MockitoTestcontainersResilience4jMapStruct
    How to hire dedicated Java developers

    Hire dedicated Java developers, two ways

    Most clients start with a single dedicated Java developer and grow into a full team. Either way, you get full-time engineers who sit on your standups, work your hours, and ship code against your roadmap. Both options are staff augmentation at the core: dedicated, long-term engineers embedded in your team rather than freelancers, shared resources, or a project shop on the side. When the project crosses the Java backend and a modern frontend, you can also hire senior full stack developers from the same bench. Teams running a JVM service alongside a new Go service can hire Golang engineers from the same staff augmentation model.

    Dedicated developer

    Full-time, exclusive, sits on your standups.

    Best for
    Long-running products with a real roadmap.
    What's included
    • Full-time Java engineer assigned only to your project
    • Works your hours, your tools, your codebase
    • Joins your standups, reports to your tech lead
    • We handle payroll, HR, equipment, retention
    • Replace within 30 days if it isn't a fit
    From first call to first commit in 7 days

    How to hire a dedicated Java developer from Full Scale

    We skip the 3-6 week recruitment cycle and the cold sourcing entirely. Our bench of Java development talent in the Philippines is already built and vetted, and every step below has a named owner on our side.

    01

    Discovery call

    Day 1

    30 minutes with our team. We learn your stack, your roadmap, the seniority level you need, and the version of Java and Spring you're working in. We don't pitch on the call, we walk through what you actually need from a hire.

    02

    Engineer match

    Days 2-3

    We pull 1-3 pre-vetted Java engineers from the bench whose skills, seniority, and prior project experience line up with what you described. You see their full profile and their actual project history.

    03

    Technical interview

    Days 3-5

    You interview the candidates the way you would interview any senior hire: live coding, system design, Hibernate and JPA gotchas, and architectural reviews. Pass anyone you don't believe in.

    04

    Contract & onboarding

    Days 5-6

    Sign once. We handle every contract, payroll, equipment, and HR detail in the Philippines so you don't have an offshore entity to manage. You just get a developer.

    05

    First commit

    Day 7

    Your developer joins your standups, gets repo access, and ships code in their first week. Our delivery managers stay involved to make sure ramp-up doesn't stall.

    How we compare

    Full Scale vs the other ways to hire a Java developer

    Every hiring path has trade-offs. Here is how a dedicated Java engineer from our Java development company compares against the alternatives most teams consider first when they want to hire Java developers.

    FeatureFull ScaleFreelancer / UpworkTraditional offshore agencyUS recruiter / FTE hire
    Pre-vetted senior Java bench
    Time to first hire7 days1-3 days3-6 weeks6-12 weeks
    Dedicated full-time, not shared
    Founder-led engineering oversight
    Sits on your standups, your tools
    Long-term retention93%+lowvariesvaries
    Replace within 30 days if it's not a fit
    Handles payroll, HR, equipment
    US-based account management
    n/a
    Typical fully-loaded cost vs US~40-50%varies~50-65%100%
    Honest tradeoffs

    When offshore Java is the wrong call

    Most pages like this would tell you offshore Java is always the right move. It is not. Below are the cases where we have either passed on a project ourselves or told the client they should not hire dedicated engineers from anyone, us included. If any of these match what you are doing, we will say so on the discovery call rather than sign you up and hope it works out.

    You don't have a real roadmap yet

    Very early stage exploration where the spec changes weekly is the wrong fit for a dedicated engineer. What you need is a co-founder or a freelancer who can absorb the thrash. A long-term hire needs accumulated context to be productive, and that context is exactly what you do not have yet.

    Your work is genuinely on-soil regulated

    Certain DoD contracts, ITAR-covered systems, and a narrow slice of regulated workloads require US persons on US soil. If that is you, we will tell you on the call, not after the contract.

    The scope is fixed and short

    Think a one-time integration, a four-week refactor, or a single migration that ends on a known date. Hire a freelancer or a specialist consultancy for those. Dedicated developers earn their value over months and years, and a short fixed-scope job rarely runs long enough to pay back the ramp-up.

    You can't actually fill a developer's time

    If you only have 10 hours of well-defined work a week, a dedicated full-time engineer will end up idle or pulled into work you didn't budget for. That ends badly for both sides. Part-time engagements and fractional hires exist for this reason, and we are not them.

    The bench

    Real Java engineers, named and vetted

    A sample of the engineers we are currently staffing. You'll see real names and real backgrounds during your interview round.

    Senior Java Engineer
    Senior Java Engineer
    Cebu, Philippines 9 years

    Built and scaled multi-tenant SaaS platforms on Spring Boot for fintech and SaaS clients. Strong in CQRS, hexagonal architecture, and event-driven integration with Kafka.

    Java 21Spring BootAWSPostgreSQLKafka
    AWS Certified Developer Associate
    Full-Stack Java Developer
    Full-Stack Java Developer
    Cebu, Philippines 7 years

    Backend-to-frontend feature delivery on Spring Boot APIs and React SPAs. Has shipped end-to-end on three production B2B platforms.

    JavaSpring BootReactTypeScriptPostgreSQL
    Oracle Certified Professional, Java SE 17
    Staff Engineer, Java / Microservices
    Staff Engineer, Java / Microservices
    Cebu, Philippines 12 years

    Distributed systems specialist who has led production migrations from Java EE to Spring Boot 3, including a Fortune 500 ticketing platform.

    JavaSpring CloudKafkaEKSTerraform
    AWS Solutions Architect Professional
    Java DevOps Engineer
    Java DevOps Engineer
    Cebu, Philippines 8 years

    Builds CI/CD for Java teams. Containerization, IaC, blue-green deployments, observability with OpenTelemetry and CloudWatch.

    JenkinsGitHub ActionsDockerK8sTerraform
    Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
    Senior Spring Boot Engineer
    Senior Spring Boot Engineer
    Cebu, Philippines 10 years

    API-first engineer who has shipped high-throughput services for retail and travel. Comfortable trading Hibernate for raw SQL when latency matters.

    Spring BootJavajOOQRedisPostgreSQL
    Oracle Certified Professional, Java SE
    Java QA Automation Lead
    Java QA Automation Lead
    Cebu, Philippines 9 years

    Builds out test pyramids and CI gates for Java teams. Strong on contract testing for distributed services and BDD scenario coverage.

    JUnit 5REST AssuredTestcontainersk6Selenium
    ISTQB Advanced

    Engineer names are anonymized on this page. You'll see real candidates during your interview round.

    Why top US engineering teams pick Full Scale

    The numbers behind a Java staffing partner that actually works

    300+
    Engineers on staff
    in Cebu, Philippines
    93%+
    Annual retention
    your team stays your team
    7 days
    To first commit
    from discovery call to shipping
    70+
    US tech companies
    trust us with their Java work
    20+ yrs
    On the JVM
    founder-led, hands-on engineering
    100s
    Of Java programmers hired
    remote, dedicated, in the Philippines
    What clients say

    From the people we actually staff teams for

    Full Scale's development team was pivotal in elevating our facility management software. Their expertise turned complex challenges into seamless functionalities, enhancing user experience and operational efficiency.

    Luke Wade
    Facility Ally
    Read the Facility Ally case study

    With Full Scale's developers, we transformed the commercial real estate landscape. Their team's proficiency in agile development and proactive communication accelerated our product release.

    Jeff Weiner
    Real Quantum
    Read the Real Quantum case study

    The team at Full Scale brought our vision to life with their development skills. They helped us navigate technical requirements with ease, resulting in a robust platform our users trust.

    Nomi Smith
    PMI Rate Pro
    Read the PMI Rate Pro case study
    Frequently asked

    Everything you wanted to know about hiring Java developers

    Hire dedicated Java developers this week

    Hire a dedicated Java developer who has actually built JVM systems before

    Book a 30-minute discovery call with the Java development company that supplies dedicated developers and custom Java development services from the Philippines. We'll learn what you're building, walk you through which dedicated Java developers, Spring Boot programmers, microservices engineers, or AWS specialists are on the bench, and you'll meet candidates within a week. You won't get pressure or a sales pitch on the call.

    First commit in 7 days
    30-day replacement guarantee
    Full-time dedicated