Staff Backend Engineer (Sports Engineering)

Quick Facts

• Role: Staff Backend Engineer (Sports Engineering)

Description

You will lead the design, development, and evolution of scalable, resilient, and maintainable distributed backend systems in a high-volume, real-time sports domain. You will provide technical leadership across architecture and engineering practices while staying hands-on—driving simplification, reliability, observability, and long-term platform health. You’ll mentor engineers, promote best practices for event-driven/reactive systems, and partner with product and engineering leadership to turn business needs into practical solutions.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and design discussions for distributed systems; evaluate options via spikes, experiments, and proofs of concept

• Simplify complex systems while maintaining performance, reliability, and code quality

• Identify scalability, resiliency, and operational risks before production; lead root cause analysis during incidents

• Improve observability, monitoring, and operational readiness; reduce technical debt

• Promote best practices for event-driven/reactive architectures, performance optimization, testing, automation, and CI/CD

• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pair programming, and technical guidance

• Collaborate with Product, Engineering Managers, and Architects to translate business problems into solutions and shape initiatives

Requirements

• Proven experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems at scale with end-to-end backend ownership in production

• Strong backend expertise in Java (preferably 21+), including 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 (Datadog, Grafana, Kibana) and debugging complex production incidents

• Strong system design and architectural decision-making across 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 and impact

• Collaborative, inclusive, fast-paced engineering environment with ownership and continuous learning

• Hybrid work policy

• 4 weeks of Workation (T&Cs apply)

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

• Training budget and ICAS assistance program

• Complimentary snacks and drinks; complimentary breakfast on Mondays

• Team and office social events

• Free parking for bicycles and motorcycles

• Free gym in the building

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