My advice is that if you want to live and work in Denver move there. The reason I say that is that I imagine I'm an employer reading this post. The risk of hiring and relocating a person who wants to move from Florida to Denver is that once I've invested the time and money to bring the person onboard, they've achieved their important goal and will quickly start looking for another job or quit to ski or breakup with the significant other that lives in Denver or decide that the beach is better than the mountains or decide to move from Denver to Pittsburgh or whatever.
That's particularly the case in terms of the listed skillset and experience. This says nothing about how good you are at what you do. It is a statement about the market for people with similar profiles. The good thing is your skillset is portable but it also means that employers can be more selective if they need mid-level Java backend developers.
Finally, most recruiters are more likely a hurdle between you and a job in Denver than a facilitator because most recruiters operate by scanning "we're hiring" pages and job boards, throwing candidates at the open positions, and then negotiating payment if something sticks. If the recruiter cannot negotiate payment, then the candidate won't get the job no matter how good a fit they are.
Some recruiters, as in relatively few, work on an exclusive contract for the employer. By which I mean that one recruiter is the only recruiter for a specific position. Typically, the exclusive contract is contingency, but the terms are agreed upfront and the working relationship with the employer tends to be stable and long term. The best recruiters work on fixed fee and get paid whether or not the position gets filled. Exclusive contracts correlate with more specialized skills and experience. Retained contracts further correlate with very senior positions and tippy top talent.
One of the keys to working with a recruiter is to figure out if the recruiter is actually worth working with. The no-relationship recruiter may completely remove any chance of your working with the company due to the risk of litigation should you get hired through another channel. Or if the outside recruiter can't close the deal, their message to the company may cast you in a poor light, heck recruiters may entirely misrepesent you.
Some tells are if the recruiter asks for your resume in an editable format. That means they send it without your name and that means that they probably don't have a contract. Another tell is simply to ask the recruiter for the name of the company. If the recruiter balks it means you can get the job on your own. Finally, the best way is to simply ask the recruiter about the nature of their recruiting relationship with the company and their track record of placing candidates with the company. Recruiters with an exclusive agreement have no problem telling you and their answers will make sense.
Circling back to my original point. If the economic risk of of moving to Denver is too high for you to take personally, then moving you is an even bigger economic risk for a business.
Good luck.
