Scala / Pekko / Akka Backend Engineer

We're looking for a Scala / Pekko / Akka Backend Engineer who's excited about event-driven, distributed architectures and who gets energy from taking features all the way from design to production.

You'll work at the core of our platform, designing and building backend services in Scala with Pekko, contributing to architectural decisions, and owning what you ship. You'll collaborate closely with peers across our NL and UA teams and help keep our codebase maintainable, observable, and a joy to work on.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and ship backend services in Scala with Pekko.
• Use Cursor / Claude Code to accelerate development: generation, refactoring, test writing, and Rabbit AI for automated code review.
• Champion code quality: documentation, testing, maintainability, and extensibility.
• Own observability: metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing are part of your definition of done.
• Own services in production: runtime tuning, scaling, on-call duties, and incident follow-ups.
• Contribute to architectural design on domain modeling and message flows.
• Reduce toil proactively, if something is done twice manually, automate it.
• Explore and experiment: prototype ideas, evaluate new tools, share learnings.

• Strong skills in Scala, our primary backend language.
• Solid grasp of concurrency, asynchronous programming, and distributed systems.
• Comfort using AI coding tools as part of your daily workflow, or strong motivation to adopt them.
• Pragmatic approach to automated testing and CI/CD.
• A mindset of shared responsibility for platform and product quality.

Nice to Have

• Experience with event-driven systems and the Pekko or Akka framework.
• Familiarity with Kafka, Opensearch, or Cassandra.
• Exposure to Google Cloud Platform (GKE, BigQuery, Vertex AI).
• Observability know-how and an SRE-oriented mindset: reliability, toil reduction, and blameless post-mortems.
• Containerization (Kubernetes) and infra-as-code., * How many years of professional backend engineering experience do you have?
• Which backend languages have you used professionally?
• Why does working at a startup appeal to you compared to a larger company?
• We work hybrid, at least 2 days per week at YES!Delft. Does this work for you?
• Describe your experience with event-driven or distributed systems.
• What is your Scala and Pekko or Akka experience?

Language:

• English (B2 or higher) (Required)

• Quality + speed: we ship to production frequently, with guardrails: reviews, tests, and automation.
• Collaboration: respectful, direct communication across NL and UA; we solve problems together.
• Learning culture: we experiment, document, and iterate. New tools are welcome if they make us better.

What We Offer

• Impact: shape a core part of a real-time B2B supply chain platform used by real buyers and suppliers.
• Modern tooling: work with AI-assisted development as a first-class practice, not an afterthought.
• Growth: deepen your Scala/Pekko expertise and broaden into DevOps and SRE practices.
• Autonomy: trust to make decisions and own services end-to-end.
• A supportive, international team operating across EU time zones.

Job Types: Full-time, Part-time, Permanent

Pay: €5.000,00 - €7.000,00 per month

Expected hours: 32 - 40 per week