Staff Backend Engineer - Sports

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a passionate and highly experienced Staff Backend Engineer to help lead the design, development, reliability, and evolution of a complex distributed backend platform.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys going deep into understanding both the technical and business context behind problems, not just implementing solutions mechanically. We value engineers who are curious, proactive, and driven by learning - people who enjoy experimenting, challenging assumptions, and troubleshooting complex systems until the root cause is fully understood.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will provide technical leadership across architecture, engineering practices, and platform evolution while remaining hands-on when needed. You will help teams make better technical decisions, raise engineering standards, simplify complex systems, and create solutions that balance business needs with long-term platform health.

We're looking for someone who is comfortable working in ambiguity, treats failure as an opportunity to learn, welcomes constructive feedback, and leads through collaboration, ownership, and execution rather than authority.

            
ABOUT YOUR FUTURE PLATFORM TEAM

We build and operate a critical backend platform that generates, validates, and distributes customer-facing offers across multiple markets in real time. The system sits at the intersection of pricing, configuration, compliance, and localization - where milliseconds matter, correctness is non-negotiable, and small mistakes can have large-scale impact.

Our systems apply complex configuration and licensing rules, handle market and event-level blocking, manage multi-language localization, and transform raw pricing data into customer-ready offers consumed across the ecosystem. We process high-throughput event streams, deal with constantly changing data, and solve problems that require both strong engineering fundamentals and deep domain understanding.

Success means no incorrect or missing offers in production, near real-time reflection of pricing and configuration changes, fully compliant offers across jurisdictions, and seamless multi-language experiences for customers.   

Our ecosystem is built around:

• Event streaming and backbone: Apache Kafka 

• Backend services: Java 23+ with Spring Boot and Vert.x (we are continuously evolving toward highly reactive, asynchronous, and event-driven architecture)

• State and performance optimization: Redis 

• Search and analytics: OpenSearch / Elasticsearch 

• Observability and operations: Datadog, Grafana, Kibana 

• Runtime and scalability: Kubernetes-based containerized infrastructure

We are actively evolving our platform toward more reactive, asynchronous, and event-driven architectures, making this an exciting environment for engineers who enjoy distributed systems, performance, concurrency, and real-time data processing challenges.
     

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Technical Leadership

• Leading architecture and design discussions for scalable, resilient distributed systems

• Collaborating with Architects and senior engineers to define solution approaches and evaluate new technologies through spikes and PoCs

• Improving and simplifying existing system designs while maintaining high engineering standards for performance, correctness, and maintainability

• Maintaining a strong engineering bar across quality, scalability, and maintainability

Platform Reliability & Engineering Excellence

• Proactively identifying scalability, reliability, and performance risks across the platform

• Leading debugging and root cause analysis for complex production incidents

• Improving observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational readiness

• Driving technical debt reduction and continuous platform improvement

• Promoting best practices across event-driven systems, resiliency patterns, performance optimization, testing, automation, and CI/CD

Team Enablement & Collaboration

• Supporting day-to-day technical coordination within the team and contributing to incident handling and engineering discussions

• Mentoring engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical guidance

• Supporting cross-team collaboration and helping troubleshoot integration and platform issues

• Encouraging a culture of collaboration, clarity, and shared ownership

• Actively participating in engineering communication channels and helping unblock others

Delivery & Execution

• Working closely with Product, Engineering Managers, and Architects to translate ideas into executable technical solutions

• Helping define and break down EPICs and technical initiatives in Jira

• Driving clarity in ambiguous or complex technical initiative

• Ensuring alignment between short-term delivery needs and long-term platform evolution

          
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Required Experience:

• Experience owning complex backend systems end-to-end in scalable production environments

• Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems

• Strong backend engineering expertise in Java, with solid understanding of JVM performance

• Hands-on experience with:

  • Apache Kafka and event-driven architectures

  • Spring Boot and/or Vert.x

  • Redis for low-latency and stateful use cases

  • OpenSearch / Elasticsearch for querying and analytics

  • Observability tools such as Datadog, Grafana, or Kibana

• Strong system design skills, including:

  • Event-driven and asynchronous architectures

  • Concurrency and non-blocking system design

  • Scalability, resiliency, and fault-tolerance strategies

  • Evaluating trade-offs between latency, throughput, and consistency

• Experience debugging production incidents in distributed environments

• Strong communication skills and ability to influence technical decisions across teams

• Proactive mindset with strong ownership and accountability

• Comfortable working in complex, fast-paced engineering environments

• Collaborative approach and willingness to support and mentor others

Nice to Have:

• Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure experience

• Experience building internal platforms or shared engineering frameworks

• SRE mindset and operational excellence practices

• Experience with real-time or high-throughput data systems

• Experience leading cross-team technical initiatives

     
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

• Teams rely on you for technical direction and practical problem-solving

• The platform becomes more reliable, scalable, and easier to operate over time

• Production incidents decrease due to proactive engineering and improved system design

• Cross-team dependencies are better coordinated and easier to manage

• Engineering quality and consistency improve across services and squads

• Engineers grow technically through your mentorship and guidance
  

WHAT WE OFFER

• Competitive salary aligned with your experience, expertise, and impact

• A collaborative, inclusive, and fast-paced engineering environment where ideas are welcomed, ownership is encouraged, and continuous learning is valued

• Hybrid work policy

• 4 weeks of Workation (T&C apply)

• Benefits package - 800 PLN net (B2B)/gross (UOP) monthly with access to the cafeteria platform (private medical care, insurances, sports card)

• Training budget

• ICAS assistance program that can provide help and guidance during challenging moments.

• Our office provides complimentary snacks and drinks; on Mondays, we serve complimentary breakfast.

• Team and office social events throughout the year

• Free parking for bicycles and motorcycles

• Free gym in the building

• Equipment: MacBook Pro + smartphone (iPhone 16/17 or Samsung Galaxy S25)