Assignment: Senior Backend Engineer

About the assignment
We are seeking a senior Backend Engineer to work on large-scale distributed platforms for our client, a company operating technology platforms at significant scale. You will design, develop and maintain highly available, performance-critical Java services where security, scalability, reliability and high engineering standards are essential. You will take responsibility across the full software lifecycle, from architecture and implementation through to deployment and production operations.

Responsibilities
You will build fault-tolerant systems focused on performance, reliability and observability, while investigating and resolving complex production issues related to latency, concurrency, scalability and system behaviour under load. The role also includes technical design reviews, architectural decision-making, and collaboration with architects, platform teams, security engineers and product stakeholders. You will help advance engineering practices around automation, automated testing and continuous delivery.

The role suits someone who enjoys complex technical problem-solving, collaborating across engineering disciplines, and taking ownership of systems operating at very large scale.

Required qualifications

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

• Strong practical experience developing RESTful APIs and event-driven architectures

• Expert-level command of Java, including memory management and garbage collection, JVM internals, performance optimisation, asynchronous and reactive programming models, and concurrency/multithreading

• Experience working with customer-facing systems where security, uptime and performance are business-critical

• Strong experience with automated testing, deployment automation and CI/CD pipelines

• Deep understanding of distributed systems, including scalability patterns, partition tolerance, failure recovery, service resiliency, and the trade-offs between availability and consistency

• At least 5 years of experience building and operating production-grade backend systems

• Experience with storage and caching technologies used at high scale, such as Memcached, Cassandra, Redis or comparable distributed data platforms

Nice to have

• Experience with machine learning infrastructure or large-scale data platforms

• Experience with cryptography, certificate management, PKI or security-focused systems

• Experience with Java frameworks for asynchronous networking

• Experience with Kubernetes and containerised infrastructure

• Experience with tools such as Maven, Docker, Spinnaker, GitHub or equivalent alternatives

Scope and location
The assignment involves working on large-scale, production-grade backend systems within a global engineering organization. Further details on scope, location/remote arrangements and start date will be shared separately upon interest.