Staff Backend Engineer - JVM (Java/Kotlin) & AWS

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will own the design and operation of the high-throughput JVM services that turn massive streams of location data into products our partners depend on in real time. You will operate with a high degree of autonomy and engagement, seeking out the problems worth solving, driving performance and reliability across our services, and making the architectural decisions that shape how the whole organisation builds and scales.

What you'll do

• Design and evolve distributed backend systems with a strong focus on scalability and correctness.
• Take services from architecture decisions through deployment and day-to-day operation.
• Maintain existing partner integrations and build new ones to deliver large-scale data to our partners reliably.
• Build and operate cloud-native systems on AWS, including migrating services from monolithic to cloud-native architectures.
• Monitor system health, troubleshoot production issues, and optimise for performance, memory, and latency.
• Collaborate closely with Product and Data teams to deliver features that move the business.
• Raise the engineering bar across teams: drive cross-team architecture decisions and grow the engineers around you.

What you'll need

• 8+ years building backend systems in production, with a track record of owning services end to end.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across teams.
• Strong expertise in Java or another JVM language (Kotlin, Scala) and the Spring ecosystem.
• Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems under real-world load.
• Deep, hands-on AWS experience (for example S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda, IAM), including designing cloud-native architectures.
• Hands-on experience with Docker and containerised deployment workflows.
• Practical experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (for example GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins).
• A strong understanding of concurrency, data consistency, and system reliability.

Nice to have

• Experience with systems processing large data volumes or high request throughput.
• A feel for architectural trade-offs (for example synchronous vs. asynchronous processing) and comfort making decisions with incomplete information.
• Experience with Terraform, MongoDB, Kubernetes, and AWS data tooling (Athena, Glue, Batch, Step Functions).
• Background in partner integrations or API-driven systems, or evolving systems from monolithic to cloud-native.

What they offer

• Flexible work: hybrid mode and remote from anywhere in the world up to 3 months per year.
• 30 vacation days per year.
• Urban Sports Club membership and company pension scheme.
• Regular team and company events.
• Latest hardware and tools provided.