• Lead architecture and design discussions for scalable, resilient and maintainable distributed systems, evaluating options through spikes, experiments and proofs of concept.

• Drive simplification of complex systems while holding a high bar for performance, reliability and code quality.
• Identify scalability, resiliency and operational risks before they reach production, and lead root cause analysis when incidents occur.
• Improve observability, monitoring and operational readiness, and drive down technical debt across the platform.
• Promote best practices around event-driven and reactive architectures, performance optimisation, testing, automation and CI/CD.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pair programming and technical guidance.
• Partner with Product, Engineering Managers and Architects to translate business problems into practical solutions, and help shape and break down technical initiatives.

• Contribute to a culture of ownership, collaboration, continuous improvement and engineering excellence.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

ESSENTIAL SKILLS

• Proven experience designing, building and operating distributed systems at scale, owning complex backend systems end-to-end in production.

• Strong backend expertise in Java (preferably 21+), with a solid understanding of JVM internals, concurrency and multithreading.
• Hands-on experience with Reactive Programming and non-blocking systems using Spring Boot and/or Vert.x.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka and event-driven architectures; familiarity with streaming and messaging technologies such as Redis or NATS.
• Experience with Redis for caching and low-latency data access, and with SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB).
• Experience with observability and monitoring platforms such as Datadog, Grafana or Kibana, and with debugging complex production incidents.
• Strong system design and architectural decision-making, balancing latency, throughput, consistency, operational complexity and maintainability.

• Ability to influence technical decisions and communicate effectively with engineers, architects, product managers and other stakeholders.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with Kubernetes, AWS and/or GCP, and cloud-native architecture patterns.

• Experience with OpenSearch and/or Elasticsearch for search, analytics and operational troubleshooting.
• Experience building internal platforms, shared frameworks or developer productivity tooling, with a strong SRE mindset.

• Experience within sports betting, gaming or other real-time, data-intensive domains.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

• Teams rely on you for technical direction and practical problem-solving, and move faster thanks to the foundations, tooling, standards and guidance you help establish.

• The platform becomes more reliable, scalable and easier to operate over time, with fewer production incidents.
• Technical decisions are made with greater clarity, consistency and long-term sustainability.
• Cross-team dependencies are better coordinated, reducing friction and improving delivery.

• Engineers grow technically through your mentorship, feedback and leadership.