Senior Backend Software Engineer (Java) – L5

About the role

Shuffle Up is seeking an experienced Senior Backend Software Engineer 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, break down problems, define execution plans, and deliver in line with product and business priorities.
• Shape the technical roadmap for your team’s systems and drive 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 technical 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, rollout, and continuous improvement.
• Experience designing and optimizing relational databases.
• Familiarity with observability, monitoring, distributed tracing, and production troubleshooting.
• Track record of leading technical discussions, influencing technical direction, and building consensus.
• Strong engineering practices such as code reviews and automation.

Required skills

• Java
• Microservices architecture
• Distributed systems
• Event‑driven architecture
• SQL / relational databases
• Observability and monitoring tools
• Distributed tracing
• Performance optimization
• CI/CD pipelines

What we offer

• Opportunity to work on high‑impact, high‑scale gaming platforms.
• Technical leadership role with influence over product direction.
• Collaborative, agile, and performance‑driven culture.