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.

• 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

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.

• 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:
  Open Search / Elasticsearch
• Observability and operations:
  Datadog, Grafana, Kibana
• Runtime and scalability:
  Kubernetes‑based containerized infrastructure

• 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 Po Cs
• 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

• 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…