Backend Engineer

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Adsquare, you will take ownership of designing and operating high-scale distributed systems that power our core data products.

Your primary mission is to build reliable, high-throughput backend services on the JVM that process and serve large volumes of location intelligence data in real time.

You will work in a highly autonomous, cross-functional team and be expected to proactively identify problems, propose solutions, and drive them to production.

In this role, you will:

• Design and evolve distributed backend systems with a strong focus on scalability, performance, and reliability
• Own services end-to-end: from architecture decisions to production operations
• Build and operate cloud-native systems on AWS
• Collaborate closely with Product and Data teams to deliver impactful features
• Continuously improve system design, engineering practices, and team effectiveness, * Maintain and evolve existing partner integrations, ensuring reliability and scalability
• Design and build new integrations to deliver large-scale data to our partners
• Contribute to migrating and adapting services to a cloud-native architecture on AWS
• Monitor system health, troubleshoot production issues, and improve overall system stability

Desired Background

We are particularly interested in candidates who have worked in environments involving:

• Data-intensive systems or high-throughput backend services
• Cloud-based architectures (especially AWS)
• Partner integrations or API-driven systems
• Systems evolving from monolithic to distributed or cloud-native architectures

Our Software Stack

Our backend stack is centered around the JVM ecosystem and AWS.

Core technologies:

• Java (11+) and Kotlin
• Spring / Spring Boot
• AWS (e.g. S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda)
• PostgreSQL

In our environment, you will also work with:

• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• NoSQL databases (e.g. MongoDB)
• Container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Data processing tools (e.g. Athena, Glue, Batch, Step Functions)

We do not expect prior experience with all of the above, but you should be comfortable working with modern cloud infrastructure and data-intensive systems.

Your Opportunities

In this role, you will have a real influence on the technical direction of our systems.

We work with a high level of ownership - engineers are expected to make decisions, propose improvements, and drive changes from idea to production.

You will be able to:

• Shape system architecture and influence key technical decisions
• Take ownership of services and drive their evolution over time
• Contribute to how we scale our systems and data processing capabilities
• Work in an environment where initiative and accountability are valued

We are looking for a senior-level engineer with a strong backend and cloud background, who is comfortable owning complex systems in production.

Must have:

• 4-5+ years of experience building backend systems in production environments
• Strong expertise in Java or other JVM-based languages (Kotlin, Scala) and the Spring ecosystem
• Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems under real-world load
• Hands-on experience with AWS, including designing cloud-native architectures
• Strong understanding of concurrency, data consistency, and system reliability
• Experience working with PostgreSQL or other relational databases in high-throughput environments
• Ability to debug and optimize systems in production (performance, memory, latency)
• A proactive approach: you identify problems, take ownership, and drive solutions without close supervision

Nice to have:

• Have worked on systems processing large volumes of data or high request throughput
• Understand trade-offs between different architectural approaches (e.g. synchronous vs asynchronous processing)
• Are comfortable making decisions in ambiguous situations