
Senior Backend Engineer (Core Team)
Playson · Remote (Europe) · Software Engineering
About the role
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
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Work as part of a cross-functional team owning a core product within the platform
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Design, build, and deliver new backend features end-to-end in a distributed environment
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Write high-quality, production-level code daily, contributing directly to a high-load, scalable system
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Take ownership of services handling financial transactions at scale, with a strong focus on reliability and accuracy
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Proactively suggest and implement improvements in architecture, processes, and development practices
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Participate in code and architectural reviews to maintain high engineering standards
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Solve complex business and technical challenges with pragmatic, efficient solutions
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Participating in on-call rotations within the squad to ensure the reliability and availability of our systems
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Play an active role in ongoing tech transformation initiatives across the platform
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Collaborate closely with engineers, product, and other stakeholders to deliver impactful solutions used by millions globally
Requirements
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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
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Strong understanding of asynchronous programming techniques
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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
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Experience designing idempotent, retry-safe handlers for at-least-once pipelines: transactional outbox, idempotency keys, and deduplication
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Experience building services with gRPC or similar RPC frameworks
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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
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Hands-on experience running services on Kubernetes and AWS/GCP: deployment, autoscaling, resource limits, and production debugging
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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
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Experience with ClickHouse or other columnar/analytical databases
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Experience with multi-region / failover architectures: data replication, regional isolation, and graceful degradation
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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
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Understanding of application security and industry best practices
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Gambling domain experience
What We Offer
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Competitive Salary
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Quarterly Bonuses
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Unlimited Paid Time Off
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Unlimited Paid Sick Leave
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Remote & Flexible Working
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Private Medical Insurance
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Financial Support for Life Events
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Professional Development Budget
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International Exposure
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Regular Company Events
*Benefits may vary depending on location and contractual agreement
Recruitment process
1. HR interview (30-45mins)
2. Interview with a Hiring Manager (45mins)
3. Technical interview with live coding (90mins)
4. Final Interview with C-level (60 mins)
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