Senior Backend Software Engineer (Java, L5)

About the role

ShuffleUp is looking for an experienced Senior Backend Software Engineer (L5) to join its growing team in Tallinn or Malta. This individual contributor role focuses on technical leadership, product evolution, and engineering excellence without people‑management responsibilities.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve high‑load distributed systems and microservice‑based applications with emphasis on scalability, reliability and maintainability.
• Own complex backend features end‑to‑end, from technical design through production operation and continuous improvement.
• Lead technical initiatives, define execution plans and drive delivery aligned with product and business priorities.
• Shape the technical roadmap for your team’s systems and make sound architectural decisions.
• Contribute hands‑on through implementation, code reviews, debugging and solving complex engineering problems.
• Identify and drive improvements in performance, reliability, observability and technical debt.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams and cross‑functional stakeholders to deliver end‑to‑end solutions.
• Mentor engineers, provide constructive feedback and raise engineering quality standards.
• Take a leading role in production incidents, identify root causes and drive follow‑up improvements.

Required profile

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong backend development in Java.
• Proven experience designing, building and operating large‑scale, event‑driven distributed systems and microservices in production.
• Deep understanding of system design, scalability, high availability and performance.
• Experience owning complex features or services end‑to‑end, including design, implementation and rollout.
• Experience with relational database design and optimization.
• Familiarity with observability, monitoring, distributed tracing and production troubleshooting.
• Track record of leading technical discussions and driving consensus on engineering decisions.

Required skills

• Java
• Microservices architecture
• Event‑driven systems
• Distributed systems design
• Relational databases (SQL)
• Observability and monitoring tools
• Distributed tracing
• Code reviews
• Debugging and performance optimization