Senior Backend Engineer; m​/f​/d Kotlin​/Boot​/AWS

• Full-time
• Contract type:
  Expert

Axel Springer is an international media and technology company with a portfolio that includes leading news brands such as BILD and WELT in Germany, ONET in Poland, and globally recognized brands like POLITICO and Business Insider. Our mission is to empower free decisions by providing trusted information.

We have completed the transformation from a traditional print publisher into a digital-first company and we continue to push the pace of product and engineering innovation.

Our strategy is clear. We aim to become the leading AI-enabled publisher in the democratic world. Artificial intelligence is not a side initiative for us. It is a core capability embedded across our products and workflows.

We believe that strong journalism is a pillar of democratic societies. If this mission resonates with you, you will find a clear sense of purpose here. Your engineering work helps millions of people access reliable information every day.

You’ll join a fast-moving, cross-functional mobile native team of Android, iOS, and backend developers — the creative force behind Germany’s leading news apps: BILD News, Sport BILD, WELT News, reaching millions of users every month. Are you open to trying new things? Are you confident, driven and clever? Then apply for a role now with Axel Springer National Media & Tech .

We believe in the future of journalism as a business model and invest in forward-looking technologies. Our five essentials are the values that unite us and guide us in our commitment to freedom.

• Take end-to-end ownership of our backend services to deliver scalable, reliable systems powering our mobile experience.
• Architect and implement robust backend solutions with Kotlin, Spring Boot, AWS, and Kotlin-based AWS Lambdas ensuring long-term performance and maintainability.
• Ensure reliability and operability of your backend services by optimizing monitoring, logging, metrics, alarming, and overall service health.
• Collaborate with our MaPS platform team to deploy and operate workloads on Kubernetes using modern, developer-friendly infrastructure.
• Develop and document clean, efficient APIs for seamless integration with other teams and products across our ecosystem.
• Act as a mentor and sparring partner for Android and cross-functional team members on backend topics to boost collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Broadens your skill set by exploring Android or iOS development and gaining insight into the full product vertical.
• Play a key role in shaping technical vision, aligning architecture decisions, and continuously improving processes for greater product impact.

• At least five years of hands‑on experience as a backend or software engineer, ideally in JVM-based backend systems.
• Fluent in Kotlin and experienced with Spring Boot, having built and operated production‑grade backend services.
• Solid track record working with AWS cloud technologies (including Lambda and container-based workloads), plus familiarity with cloud‑native patterns like IAM, S3, and messaging services.
• Interest in Kubernetes, understanding concepts like deployments, observability, and containerized workloads.
• Strong commitment to code quality, maintainable architectures, testing and long-term system ownership.
• Enthusiasm for monitoring, transparency, and building systems that are easy to operate.
• Proven strength in mentoring colleagues, building cross‑team relationships, and actively promoting knowledge sharing in diverse environments.
• Strong communicator who translates complex technical topics for product managers, designers, and fellow engineers.

• Your personal growth is important to us: we offer trainings and learning lunches, tech conferences, a…