Staff Backend Engineer - Sports

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a passionate and highly experienced Staff 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 naturally curious, proactive in experimentation, and persistent in troubleshooting complex systems until the root cause is fully understood.

As a Staff Engineer, you are expected to bring strong technical leadership while remaining grounded, collaborative, and execution-focused. You should maintain high work ethics, take ownership in critical situations, support the team during operational challenges, and continuously raise the bar for engineering quality, resiliency, and operational excellence
    
We are looking for someone who is:

• Passionate about engineering and solving real-world system problems

• Curious and willing to experiment, validate ideas, and learn quickly

• Comfortable working in ambiguity and complex distributed environments

• Not afraid of failure and able to treat it as a learning opportunity

• Open to feedback and able to handle rejection of ideas constructively

• Strong in work ethics, accountability, and follow-through

• Focused on building what is right for the platform and the business

• Proactive, dependable, and supportive toward other engineers and teams

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.

The platform applies complex configuration and licensing rules, handles market and event-level blocking, manages multi-language localization, and transforms raw pricing data into structured, customer-ready offers consumed across the ecosystem. We deal with high-throughput event streams, constantly changing data, and domain complexity that requires both strong engineering fundamentals and sharp problem-solving instincts.

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

This is a high-scale distributed systems environment where reliability, performance, observability, and simplicity matter. We value engineers who enjoy going deep into problems, challenge ideas constructively, stay curious, and care about building systems that are not only scalable, but also understandable and maintainable by the people working on them every day.

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

RESPONSIBILITIES

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

WE ARE LOOKING FOR:

ESSENTIAL

• 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
  

SUCCESS IN THIS ROLE 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
   

WE OFFER:

• 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)