Principal Java Engineer - Football Squad

As a Principal Java Engineer in our Football Backend Team, you'll play a key role in designing, developing, and optimising data-intensive backend services that power live football events. Our team is responsible for managing data feeds, event-driven processing, and cloud-based infrastructure to deliver real-time insights to global football leagues and partners.

You'll work in an agile environment, collaborating with engineers across our football backend team. Given the high-profile nature of our work, we operate in a fast-moving environment where efficiency and scalability are key to success.

What We Value

At Hawk-Eye, we believe in collaboration, ownership, and innovation. We strive to create an environment where engineers can contribute meaningfully, solve challenging problems, and improve their skills. Given the pace of work, we value engineers who can hit the ground running, take initiative, and contribute to mission-critical projects from day one., * Develop, optimise, and maintain backend services using Java (Spring Boot)

• Contribute to design decisions for new and existing projects
• Work on football-related data pipelines that power FIFA, Serie-A and UEFA operations
• Deploy and scale applications in AWS (ECS, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, etc.)
• Enhance system observability, ensuring real-time monitoring and logging using tools like Datadog
• Work on event-driven architectures, leveraging message queues (Pulsar, Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, etc.)
• Collaborate with engineers, stakeholders and external partners to meet high-impact project deadlines
• Ensure system reliability and performance in high-traffic, real-time environments, Hawk-Eye is committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace. We ensure all employees are treated fairly, regardless of gender, marital status, race, nationality, religion, age, disability, or union membership status. We value diversity and strive to create an environment where everyone can reach their full potential.

• Expert-level Java 17+ & Spring Boot
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives and mentor senior engineers
• Strong experience with AWS (or other major cloud providers)
• Familiarity with observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
• Experience with designing and evolving microservices and complex distributed systems at scale
• Thorough understanding of monitoring, logging, and traceability
• Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, etc.)
• Ability to bridge the gap between technical details and business requirements in a fast-paced environment

Bonus Skills:

• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (GitHub Actions, Terraform)
• Familiarity with containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Exposure to real-time data processing, low-latency systems and sports tech

This is a fantastic opportunity to join Hawk-Eye Innovations and make a significant impact in football technology. If you're looking for a role where you can solve real-world problems at scale, we'd love to hear from you!