Staff Backend Engineer (Sports Betting)

Quick Facts

• Role: Staff Backend Engineer (Sports Betting)

• Focus: Technical leadership and hands-on development for a real-time sportsbook backend platform.

Description

Lead the design, development, and evolution of distributed systems powering a sportsbook platform that transforms sports, trading, and pricing data into customer experiences. Provide technical leadership across architecture and engineering practices while staying hands-on—simplifying complex systems, improving performance and reliability, strengthening observability, and raising engineering standards.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and design discussions for scalable, resilient, maintainable distributed systems; evaluate options via spikes, experiments, and proofs of concept.
• Drive simplification of complex systems while maintaining a high bar for performance, reliability, and code quality.
• Identify scalability, resiliency, and operational risks before they reach production; lead root cause analysis during incidents.
• Improve observability, monitoring, and operational readiness; reduce technical debt across the platform.
• Promote best practices around event-driven and reactive architectures, performance optimization, testing, automation, and CI/CD.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pair programming, and technical guidance.
• Partner with Product, Engineering Managers, and Architects to translate business problems into practical solutions and shape technical initiatives.
• Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence.

Requirements

• Proven experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems at scale; end-to-end backend production ownership.
• Strong Java backend expertise (preferably Java 21+) with knowledge of JVM internals, concurrency, and multithreading.
• Hands-on experience with reactive programming and non-blocking systems using Spring Boot and/or Vert.x.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and event-driven architectures; familiarity with streaming/messaging technologies such as Redis or NATS.
• Experience with Redis for caching and low-latency data access; experience with SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB).
• Experience with observability and monitoring platforms such as Datadog, Grafana, or Kibana; able to debug complex production incidents.
• Strong system design and architectural decision-making, balancing latency, throughput, consistency, operational complexity, and maintainability.
• Ability to influence technical decisions and communicate effectively with engineers, architects, product managers, and stakeholders.

Benefits

• Competitive salary aligned with experience, expertise, and impact.
• Collaborative, inclusive, fast-paced engineering environment with ownership and continuous learning.
• Hybrid work policy and 4 weeks of Workation (T&Cs apply).
• Benefits package: 800 PLN net (B2B)/gross (UOP) monthly with access to the cafeteria platform (private medical care, insurance, sports card).
• Training budget and ICAS assistance programme.
• Complimentary snacks and drinks in the office, plus complimentary breakfast on Mondays.
• Team and office social events throughout the year.
• Free parking for bicycles and motorcycles and a free gym in the building.
• Equipment: MacBook Pro and smartphone (iPhone 16/17 or Samsung Galaxy S25).