
Senior Backend Engineer (Core Team) at Playson (Europe)
Playson· Europe·
Role details
Competitive Salary · Quarterly Bonuses · Unlimited Paid Vacation · Unlimited Paid Sick Leave · Flexible Schedule · Remote Work · Medical Insurance · Financial Support For Life Events
Summary
Build, optimize, and scale backend services for a high-performance iGaming platform. The role involves writing production code, improving latency, ensuring system reliability, and participating in on-call rotations within a cross-functional team.
Job description
About the Role
We’re looking for a Senior Backend Developer who thrives in a deeply hands-on environment and enjoys being close to the code on a daily basis. This role is heavily focused on building, optimising, and scaling backend services in a high-load system where performance and reliability are critical. You’ll be working on complex, real-time challenges at the core of our platform - improving latency, ensuring high availability, and making systems more efficient at scale. This is not a coordination-heavy role; it’s for someone who enjoys writing production code, solving tough engineering problems, and seeing the direct impact of their work. If you’re product-driven, take ownership, and prefer a “build first, improve fast” approach while working on systems where every millisecond matters - this role will feel like home.
Key Responsibilities
- Work as part of a cross-functional team owning a core product within the platform
- Design, build, and deliver new backend features end-to-end in a distributed environment
- Write high-quality, production-level code daily, contributing directly to a high-load, scalable system
- Take ownership of services handling financial transactions at scale, with a strong focus on reliability and accuracy
- Proactively suggest and implement improvements in architecture, processes, and development practices
- Participate in code and architectural reviews to maintain high engineering standards
- Solve complex business and technical challenges with pragmatic, efficient solutions
- Participating in on-call rotations within the squad to ensure the reliability and availability of our systems
- Play an active role in ongoing tech transformation initiatives across the platform
- Collaborate closely with engineers, product, and other stakeholders to deliver impactful solutions used by millions globally
Requirements
- Solid experience with Node.js/TypeScript is ideal, but we also welcome experts in other OOP languages such as Java, Python, C++, C#, or Go
- Strong understanding of asynchronous programming techniques
- Deep production experience with Kafka: confident reasoning about consumer-group rebalances and their impact on in-flight processing, offset-commit strategies under retries and duplicate delivery, and the limits of "exactly-once" semantics
- Experience designing idempotent, retry-safe handlers for at-least-once pipelines: transactional outbox, idempotency keys, and deduplication
- Experience building services with gRPC or similar RPC frameworks
- Strong knowledge of relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, plus production experience with at least one NoSQL technology at scale, such as DynamoDB, MongoDB, or Redis
- Hands-on experience running services on Kubernetes and AWS/GCP: deployment, autoscaling, resource limits, and production debugging
- Production operations experience: on-call ownership of a high-load system, including incident response, impact assessment, root-cause analysis, and post-incident improvements
Nice to Have
- Experience with ClickHouse or other columnar/analytical databases
- Experience with multi-region / failover architectures: data replication, regional isolation, and graceful degradation
- Practical use of AI coding agents such as Cursor or Claude Code as part of daily development: effective prompting, reviewing, and validating AI-generated code
- Understanding of application security and industry best practices
- Gambling domain experience
What We Offer
- Competitive Salary
- Quarterly Bonuses
- Unlimited Paid Time Off
- Unlimited Paid Sick Leave
- Remote & Flexible Working
- Private Medical Insurance
- Financial Support for Life Events
- Professional Development Budget
- International Exposure
- Regular Company Events
*Benefits may vary depending on location and contractual agreement Recruitment process
- HR interview (30-45mins)
- Interview with a Hiring Manager (45mins)
- Technical interview with live coding (90mins)
- Final Interview with C-level (60 mins)
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Why work at Playson
- Culture: Described as a team with a "strong engineering focus and product-oriented mindset." Values include "Fail Fast. Learn Fast." (a culture of experimentation), "Up or Out" (promoting career development), and "Extraordinary Products. Extraordinary Results."
- Work Model: Remote & Hybrid work options available.
- Perks: Full medical insurance for you and your +1, development courses/training reimbursement, bonus system, flexibility in schedule, and twice-a-year corporate gatherings.
- Engineering Culture: A flat structure that enables direct idea-sharing with management. The company uses a modern tech stack including Kubernetes, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, and Python.